Showdown With The Rebel

By Johanna McGeary

For eight days, the warnings of a decisive military showdown echoed across Najaf as fighting raged between U.S. forces and Shi'ite militiamen for control of the holy city. The Shi'ites' truculent leader, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, vowed not to leave his bunker in the sect's sacred Imam Ali shrine "until the last drop of my blood has been spilled." The U.S. Marine colonel commanding American and Iraqi-government troops battling the stubborn gunmen of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army proclaimed his men were ready "to finish this fight that the Muqtada militia started." Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister of Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government, declared there would be "no negotiation or truce" with the Shi'ite rebels. As the battle unfolded amid the dusty vastness of the city's Valley of Peace cemetery adjacent to the shrine and U.S. Marines engaged in a tomb-to-tomb fight with black-clad Mahdi fighters, all the elements of Armageddon seemed to be converging on the place.

And then on the ninth day, everyone drew back. A delegation of Iraqi leaders led by Allawi's National Security Adviser, Muwaffak al-Rubaie, arrived from Baghdad to open talks with al-Sadr aides. U.S. troops suspended their offensive against the Mahdi Army, while the fighters who had battled the Americans hand to hand melted back into the sanctuary of the shrine.

But when al-Rubaie sat down with al-Sadr's representatives, one of them coolly demanded, "Is this cease-fire because you are strong or weak?" Al-Sadr's men evidently thought they knew the answer as they presented him with a list of demands, starting with a complete withdrawal of coalition forces from Najaf and setting terms that would effectively leave Najaf's security in the hands of Shi'ite forces under clerical control. Iraqi officials insisted the militia had to be disbanded but offered to let the movement join the political process. Al-Sadr did not even bother to attend the talks and told al-Jazeera television Saturday morning that the interim government must resign. After round-the-clock sessions, negotiations broke down Saturday evening. The talks, concluded al-Rubaie, had been going nowhere.

That left everyone bracing to see whether battle would resume. But the pause was an acknowledgment of how much was at risk for all sides. The uprising poses a grave challenge to the seven-week-old interim government, which has yet to establish popular legitimacy or law and order amid the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq. Allawi had set himself up as a tough guy ready to impose draconian measures to quell the country's relentless violence. Yet taking the fight all the way to the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine, where al-Sadr's men were dug in, could spark uncontrollable rage among the country's majority Shi'ite population. Unrest had quickly spread across the Shi'ite south and into Baghdad's teeming Sadr City slums. Washington sensed that a critical turning point had been reached: a widening conflagration would not only be devastating to the U.S. effort to bring some order to Iraq, but it would also be sure to reverberate far across the Muslim world if American troops damaged the sacred shrine.

At the core of the crisis loomed the turban-clad figure al-Sadr, the troublesome young cleric who has repeatedly taken up arms to reorder the future of Iraq and advance his own political ambitions. He has made a name by defying the U.S. occupation, but this time he seemed just as intent on undermining the fragile new Iraqi regime. Until now, neither U.S. nor Iraqi authorities have found a way to neutralize him. But there was peril in a climactic showdown for him as well. This is not the first time al-Sadr has sworn to make himself a martyr and then failed to follow through--though reports he was lightly wounded last week burnished that martyr image among his followers. If casualty figures from U.S. officials are accurate, the weeklong onslaught took the lives of hundreds of Mahdi fighters. Al-Sadr faced the prospect of a tightening siege that could humble him into surrender. So as he has in the past, he apparently opted to see what gains he could pocket by returning to negotiations.

The rise of al-Sadr has been one of the most unexpected consequences of the U.S. invasion. While some Shi'ites see him as an intemperate opportunist, others admire his courageous stance against the foreign occupiers. Either way, the lightly regarded cleric has proved adept at the game of advance and retreat to force his way to a prominence no Shi'ite of his youth and low religious rank could normally have achieved.

All al-Sadr, who is around 30, originally had going for him was his name. His father and uncle were revered ayatullahs who were giants of the Shi'ite seminaries in Najaf and commanded the respect and affection of Shi'ites everywhere. A close aide says Muqtada never expected to lead the followers of the Sadr family until Saddam Hussein killed his father and two older brothers in 1999. Despite painful shyness and a singular lack of oratorical skill--his critics among the clergy say that is proof of his incomplete religious education, which puts a high premium on elocution--Muqtada felt he could not deny his responsibility to the family legacy. For al-Sadr loyalists, he needed no further claim to legitimacy than his bloodline.

In the months after Saddam's fall, al-Sadr saw himself as the Shi'ites' rightful political leader. He resented the returned secular Shi'ite exiles who claimed to speak for the community. "We are a very religious people," says Mohammed al-Fartusi, one of al-Sadr's chief organizers in Baghdad, "so we should be represented by religious leaders." The young cleric's plan was to position himself as the one who understands the aspirations of the long-suffering Iraqi Shi'ites and would stand up for their rights.

Critics say al-Sadr had another motivation in putting himself forward: money. The millions of Shi'ite pilgrims who visit the shrine in Najaf are required to pay a tithe to the Hawza, the supreme Iraqi Shi'ite religious authority. The reigning Grand Ayatullah has the largest say in how the money is divided among Shi'ite groups. When al-Sadr's father held the post, he was able to keep his faction well supplied with cash, but his death substantially reduced the cut received by al-Sadr's family. The Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, who now holds the purse strings, is leery of giving much to al-Sadr. He is worried that al-Sadr will use the money to strengthen his militia and eventually take over as the next Grand Ayatullah. And Sistani's moderating influence was sorely missed last week: the senior Shi'ite cleric, 73, was in London to undergo angioplasty to open a blocked artery.

Al-Sadr was snubbed from the outset by the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority when it denied him a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council, set up shortly after the war. Cut out of the political process, al-Sadr soon began delivering fiery sermons denouncing the council, the U.S. and the occupation. That struck a chord among the angry, restless young men of the slum neighborhood renamed Sadr City for al-Sadr's father. So did his Arab origins, which had always set the al-Sadr line apart from the Iranian-born Shi'ite ayatullahs like Sistani. For radicals who want to see religious power in the hands of an ethnic Arab, al-Sadr has the right pedigree. Soon he was recruiting Shi'ites into an armed militia, the Mahdi Army, named for the messiah the Shi'ites await. Their stated aim was to drive foreign infidels from the holy cities. But al-Sadr also wanted to deter aggressive Sunni militants from leaving Shi'ites out in the cold and to counter the militias belonging to other Shi'ite pretenders to power. "The Mahdi Army," says Sheik Qais Hadi al-Kazali, a spokesman for and close aide to al-Sadr, "will ensure that political power is shared in a just way."

Since then, al-Sadr has unleashed his militia on the U.S. military and Iraqi authorities when he has felt his claims to power were being ignored. He was angered again during the formation of the interim government last spring, when his demand for control of two ministries was rebuffed. After his newspaper was shut down in late March and the Coalition Provisional Authority revealed that a warrant had been issued for his arrest on murder charges, he sent his fighters into the streets of Najaf and Sadr City for two months. He eventually accepted a favorable truce in June that relegated U.S. forces to bases outside the city and did nothing to rid the place of anti-American rebels. U.S. military commanders complained that the political deal simply gave him breathing room to rebuild his battered forces and consolidate himself as the chief Shi'ite resistance leader. There was a growing sense at the Pentagon that such a strategy had only delayed a day of reckoning.

In Baghdad, authorities wavered between efforts to keep him at arm's length and attempts to invite him into the political process. The Bush Administration regards him as a thug and refuses to engage with someone it sees as a carbon copy of Iran's ruling mullahs. Nor do Western officials in Baghdad trust his tactics. "We've been watching him take over the city of Najaf bit by bit by bit," says an official. "That experience has given us cause to question his credibility when he makes promises and to wonder whether he is prepared to play in a political process marked by votes."

Nevertheless, Iraqi leaders in the interim government who are desperate for national reconciliation see the value of according a role to al-Sadr and his wide following. When the interim government regained sovereignty, Prime Minister Allawi opened talks with the cleric, even offering clemency for the murder charge against him. For weeks, Fa'oud Massoum, the chairman of the committee organizing the national conference to choose an interim legislature, tried to persuade al-Sadr to send representatives, but he has refused.

Al-Sadr also sees profit in lashing out at Allawi's fragile government. He has kept up his barrage of sermons criticizing the new leadership's failure to improve civil services and security. But some who know al-Sadr say his decision to resume combat had little to do with citizens' grievances and a lot to do with the improving ability of Iraqi government forces to challenge his control in Najaf. Since the hand-off, the strength of the Iraqi National Guard and Iraqi police officers has grown; they are stopping thieves, arresting drug dealers, slowly winning the loyalty of Najaf's embattled citizens.

The Mahdi militia regarded the new forces as a rival gang on its turf. Two weeks ago, government security men arrested one of al-Sadr's closest aides in nearby Karbala, and the truce unraveled from there. Al-Sadr's militiamen then accused U.S. Marines, who have recently taken over responsibility for policing Najaf, of breaking the cease-fire's rules by moving into parts of the city that were supposed to be off limits to them. U.S. officials put the blame on the militia: in the early hours of Aug. 5, Mahdi fighters assaulted a police station with such ferocity that the Iraqis inside had to call for U.S. help. The war was on.

Making matters worse was the absence of Sistani, who left his home in Najaf two weeks ago for medical treatment in London. Al-Sadr supporters say the U.S. was exploiting his absence to crack down on the populist cleric. But Sistani's associates say al-Sadr was the one taking advantage of the ayatullah's departure to intensify his campaign against the U.S. Just before undergoing angioplasty, the Grand Ayatullah issued a strong statement calling on all parties to stop the fighting.

That may have encouraged the sides to step back for a moment from a climactic confrontation. But al-Sadr has a proven track record of standing up to the U.S. by exploiting American reluctance to storm a holy place. "The shrine," says British Major General Andrew Graham, deputy commander of the Multinational Corps-Iraq, "is an invisible shield. He's picked a battlefield where he knows we won't go." That is why both sides have repeated the pattern of go-no-go set in Fallujah. "Tell me," says Graham, "what are the alternatives?" --With reporting by Christopher Allbritton, Brian Bennett, Aparisim Ghosh and staff reporters/Baghdad; Scott MacLeod/Cairo; and Mark Thompson/Washington

Christopher Allbritton, Brian Bennett, Bobby Ghosh and staff reporters/Baghdad; Scott MacLeod/Cairo; and Mark Thompson/Washington