BAGHDAD: The fiery cleric behind a Shia insurrection in Iraq is confronting the US-led occupation head-on, implicitly challenging the peaceful strategy of his community's more established leaders.
Moqtada al-Sadr, shut out of mainstream politics by Iraq's US administrator Paul Bremer, has surged back onto the scene by unleashing his youthful gunmen and supporters onto the streets of Baghdad and cities across the mainly Shia south.
Sadr, 30, knows he cannot match the religious authority of Iraq's foremost Shia leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, but is paying no heed to a Sistani-inspired appeal for calm. His display of street muscle is a headache not only for US-led forces grappling with a Sunni insurgency, but also for Shia political leaders sitting on the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council which Sadr views as illegitimate.
Hamid al-Bayati, spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), said Shias wanted to deal peacefully with the US-led occupiers. "This is the first time we see violence between Shias and the coalition. It's a dangerous escalation," he said.
SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is a member of the Governing Council, as is Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the Shia Daawa Party. Both returned from exile after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein a year ago this week.
Sadr and his rampaging black-clad militiamen are in effect contesting such leaders' claims to represent Shias in post-war Iraq, which are as untested in any election as his own. "Sadr's action also challenges the US notion that the Shias are a 60 per cent majority bloc. They clearly are not," said Charles Tripp, a British scholar of Iraq.
"I doubt Sadr has huge numbers of supporters, but he has enough in several cities, with enough guns, to cause lots of trouble. He's showing he can't easily be ignored," Tripp said.
SADR DEFIANT: Bremer and Sadr each blame the other for provoking the clashes that have already cost scores of lives. Both have their eye on a planned June 30 transfer of power to Iraqis.
After Sadr turned up his anti-US rhetoric, Bremer closed his newspaper and then had one of his aides arrested over the murder of a moderate Shia leader a year ago. When protests in Baghdad and across the south turned violent, Bremer let it be known that Sadr himself was wanted for the killing of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, hacked to death in a Najaf mosque just after he had returned from exile in Britain.
Bayati said he could not understand why the Americans had chosen to pursue Sadr as a wanted criminal now, months after an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
After Bremer branded Sadr an outlaw on Monday, the leader said this was a badge of pride "if it means breaking the law of the American tyranny and its filthy constitution (for Iraq)".
The Shia establishment has underlined its reservations about the de facto constitution passed by the Governing Council last month, but hopes that promised elections will empower Shias oppressed by Saddam, with no need for violence.
Clearly alarmed, Shia moderates want Sadr to cool his revolt, before it drags Shias at large into the sort of violence racking Sunni areas north and west of Baghdad. Sistani exerts huge influence over Shias from his Najaf base, though he kept quiet politically during Saddam's time. -Reuters
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