February 25, 2007	Sunday	Safar 7, 1428

BAGHDAD: The furore over the US detention of the son of Iraq’s most powerful Shia politician delivers a clear message to the US — don’t push the Shia too far.

It is a lesson that takes on added importance as the Americans seek to curb Iran’s influence — while cultivating the very Shia organisations with the closest links to Tehran.

That contradiction came to the forefront on Friday when US soldiers detained Amar al-Hakim, son of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, as he crossed the border from Iran. The elder al-Hakim heads the biggest Shia party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

The younger al-Hakim was released after nearly 12 hours and US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was quick to apologise.

But to drive home a point, Shia protesters took to the streets on Saturday throughout the Shia south and in the Baghdad district of Sadr City to express outrage.

Individually, the protests were small, each numbering in the hundreds. Collectively, they sent a message that the Shias, an estimated 60 per cent of Iraq’s 27 million people, cannot be pushed around — and that they can cause trouble on a scale the Americans cannot control.

SCIRI and other mainstream Shia parties have no interest in making trouble now, especially since the US is sending more troops to shore up the Shia-led government. But the potential for trouble is there if American and Shia interests diverge.

The risks have heightened since Britain, which is responsible for security in the Shia south, announced plans to withdraw its troops. The first 1,600 of the over 7,000-strong British force will depart in the coming months.

They will leave behind a region that has been quieter than the Sunni strongholds where US troops have been battling a resilient insurgency.

But the Shia south is by no means stable.

It is rife with criminal gangs and Shia militias that have infiltrated the police and the local governments. Shia Islamist parties have dominated the provincial administration of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, since the January 2005 election.Unlike the Sunni insurgents, Shia extremists do not pose a direct threat to the national government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia.

But their activities undermine government authority and threaten stability in a region which holds most of Iraq’s oil wealth. Most of Iraq’s oil is exported from the south.

Much of the fuel, food and ammunition for US troops fighting the Sunnis to the north arrives by convoy through the south.

Politically, the Shia community is by no means united, and SCIRI does not control the entire region.

The number of armed factions, tribal gunmen, religious spin-offs and criminal gangs likely runs into the dozens. Mainstream parties compete for control of major southern cities.

But they can rally together when Shia interests are at stake.

“Such militias and their attached politicians will compete violently at the local level, but they will also periodically close ranks whenever foreign or national interlopers seek to re-establish some degree of control over the deep south,” wrote Mideast analysts Michael Knights and Ed Williams in a report for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

That fact weighs heavily on US planners as Washington seeks to curb Iran’s influence with the Shia parties. The US believes Iran is providing money and weapons used to kill Americans and has no interest in seeing Iraq fall under Tehran’s domination when American troops leave.

Many Shias suspect that the move against the younger al-Hakim — which occurred at the border with Iran — was more than a simple mistake.

But the American dilemma is that the parties believed to be key recipients of Iranian support play major roles in the very government that the United States supports.

America needs the major Shia parties, including SCIRI, if it hopes to restore enough stability to withdraw its troops with its own honour intact.

The US has understood the delicate nature of its relationship with Shia parties since the early days of the US occupation. The Americans cultivated Shia leaders, including al-Hakim’s father.

And the US revised its formula for handing over power to the Iraqis several times at the insistence of Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — even though many US planners feared the consequences.

The price of a pro-Shia strategy was to alienate the Sunnis and perhaps invigorate the insurgency. But the alternative would have been worse: a two-front war.

The US got a taste of that during two uprisings by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. US troops killed thousands of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia before Shia clerics and politicians negotiated cease-fires.

US commanders were eager to accept them because they needed the troops to fight the Sunnis. The Americans looked the other way when al-Sadr’s fighters simply hid their weapons to fight another day.—AP