October 16, 2003	Thursday	Sha'aban 19, 1424

BAGHDAD: Rasha Abdullah considers herself a devout and observant Shia. She dresses modestly in full-length black robes, carefully covers her black hair with a headscarf, and makes regular pilgrimages to Shia shrines.

But she recoiled with distaste when asked whether she would support a breakaway government that Muqtader Sadr, a street-smart young Shia leader, is trying to launch, by using his large following among disadvantaged, disaffected Shias as a springboard.

“No,” said Abdullah, a 20-year-old student who lives in a middle-class Shia neighbourhood in Baghdad and hopes to become an engineer.

Sadr’s stature as head of a self-declared alternative government and leader of a shadowy militia has, on the surface at least, caused only a minor ripple of concern to Iraq’s interim governing body and the provisional US-led administration, which still makes all the important decisions here.

His burgeoning movement among the poor has caused consternation to moderate, educated and better-off Shias, who fear it could undermine what until now has been a fairly cordial working relationship between Shia leaders and coalition military authorities — and perhaps deprive Shias of some of the newfound political clout they expect to wield in post-war Iraq.

Even critics take Sadr seriously because of his pedigree and his popularity among the growing number of Iraqis unhappy with the US occupation. Six months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the average Iraqi is long past the euphoria of the dictator’s fall, but still far from confident that the country will claim a place in the developed world any time soon.

The objections voiced by more mainstream Shias to Sadr rest largely on his vocal and confrontational stance toward the Americans and Iraq’s US-appointed interim authority, the Governing Council.

From mosques in Shia strongholds like the Baghdad slum of Sadr City and the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the young leader has denounced the Americans as clumsy aggressors who have overstayed their welcome and lambasted the Governing Council as timorous and ineffectual.

Shia religious eminences, who tend to be elderly and scholarly, can barely contain their distaste at the sight of the brash preacher, about 30 years of age with an undistinguished record as a seminarian who styles himself as a religious authority.

But despite such rumblings, Sadr has a respected pedigree, in both religious and political terms: He is the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a much-revered Shia religious leader who built social-welfare programmes in his neighbourhood. He was killed four years ago, together with Muqtader’s two elder brothers, by assassins believed linked to Saddam’s security forces.

For the Shias, to whom extraordinary suffering was meted out by the deposed Iraqi leader, these circumstances alone merit a degree of respect for the holy man’s surviving son. Due in part to that, even Shia leaders and politicians who feel threatened by Sadr and his movement are reluctant to denounce him publicly.

“We respect him and his views, but what he’s doing is dangerous,” said Sheik Hamid Rashid of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Sadr’s power base rests largely among those who have both the least to gain and the least to lose in the new Iraq — angry, jobless, uneducated young Shia men, recruited to his ranks primarily in the gritty streets of Sadr City, an enclave that was once called Saddam City but was renamed for Sadr’s slain father after Saddam was toppled.

Like many fundamentalist groups elsewhere, Sadr’s camp has been at pains to cultivate a power base in community social services, keeping a tight grip on schools, clinics and hospitals in Sadr City.

Coalition authorities, who have been trying to win Iraqi hearts and minds with much-needed infrastructure projects like a sewage system for Sadr City, complain that Sadr’s followers have halted or disrupted work on many such endeavours by taking over the neighbourhood town hall and booting out any municipal official they consider to have been a collaborator with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

For the US-led coalition, the most crucial question regarding Sadr is not the government he announced last week that he was forming to challenge the existing Iraqi interim authority, but his ability to orchestrate armed attacks on American troops.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.