Civil strife is not the only conflict for Iraq's Shias

An internal struggle for power has put the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr back at centre stage - and the Americans won't like it

Jonathan Steele Friday March 3, 2006

Guardian

It was the moment feared by everyone in Iraq, whether foreigner or Iraqi. Our car was stuck in traffic in Najaf. Two men in white robes walked out in front of us and took pistols from their pockets. Opening the car's front doors, they forced the driver and translator to get out and squeeze into the back with me. A third gunman appeared and got in with us. Twenty yards away traffic police watched but did nothing. The congestion eased and our new driver inched slowly up the street. I was by the door but scotched a fleeting instinct to jump out. Bullets would surely follow.

We reached a roundabout where the driver turned back towards the centre. I felt relief. Wouldn't a safe house to hold us hostage be out of town? Perhaps our captors were plain-clothes "detectives" from the Mahdi army, the militias loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, rather than a ransom gang. Maybe our activities had aroused suspicions.

That morning I had interviewed Ahmed al-Shaibani, one of Sadr's deputies. He explained a deal that US forces had just reached with the Mahdi army about who should control public order in Najaf. I then approached two US bases to get their version. We were refused admission, but our visits were spotted, I began to think, by the cigarette sellers who hang about nearby and must have reported us to headquarters.

Back in Najaf, our captors drove to the shrine of Imam Ali and stopped by a low building at the back. Stripped of our mobile phones, we were interrogated about our trip to the US bases; they hinted that we were spies. We explained that we had not been allowed in, and had talked to Shaibani. Why not contact him and he would surely vouch for us? Luckily they agreed, and 15 minutes later the young "sheikh" appeared. He sternly ticked the gunmen off and assured us this was not the way the Mahdi army behaved to journalists.

Freed to leave, I drew two conclusions from the brief but scary encounter. Normal reporting, where you visit the "other side" of a story, was no longer possible, at least not on the same day. Lesson two was that Sadr's Mahdi army was a powerful force, a state within a state, but capable of discipline.

That was June 2004. Weeks later it was in full revolt against the Americans in a battle that left hundreds of Mahdi fighters dead and much of Najaf in ruins.

Now, as Iraq slips into greater chaos after the bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra, Sadr is back at centre stage. He was one of the first Shia leaders to call for restraint and for no reprisals against Sunnis. His envoys have visited the main Sunni religious group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, to issue a joint call to imams to prevent sectarian conflict, despite the provocation. He is also a bastion against Iraq's fragmentation. He disagrees with the other leading Shia player, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which supports a decentralised Iraq with autonomy for the mainly Shia south.

Confused and vacillating, the Americans now seem to recognise that the constitution which they helped to push through last year is a recipe for Iraq's collapse, as Sadr warned. But the US cannot forgive his consistent opposition to the occupation, which he repeated this week in the statement with the Sunni scholars. Nor have the Americans accepted Sadr's role in supporting Ibrahim al-Jaafari to remain as prime minister instead of Sciri's neoliberal economist, Adel Abdel Mahdi. With US encouragement, Kurdish leaders have launched a move to block Jaafari's reappointment.

In spite of the killing of Sunnis and Shias, the main struggle these days is an intra-Shia one. The Mahdi army attacked several Sciri offices in southern Iraq last summer, putting Sciri in a weak position everywhere, including Basra. Under cover of the latest mayhem, each side accuses the other of sending snatch teams into mixed Sunni-Shia areas to kill people. While the Mahdi army's role is hard to prove (anyone can use men in black clothes, the trademark Mahdi dress, to terrorise people), Sciri's link to death squads that have killed hundreds of Iraqis in recent months is established: a Sciri minister runs the police, who operate a network of torture centres in Baghdad, which the Americans themselves have denounced.

The US is turning against the federalism it favoured last year. Anxious to bring Sunnis into government, it advocates legislation to "implement" the constitution, but in fact to amend it - a goal that looks unlikely unless Sciri changes its line or is marginalised.

The constant talk of civil war is undermining even the hardiest secular Iraqis, though it is still far from reality. Minorities in mixed areas are slipping away to be with their "own". Community leaders and imams are targeted. But the violence is mainly imposed from above. Balkan-style pogroms where neighbour turns against neighbour, burning houses and shops, have not happened.

The Americans use the fears of civil war to give life to their mission. The International Crisis Group, a thinktank, said last week that "US forces are preventing, by their very presence and military muscle, ethnic and sectarian violence from spiralling out of control". In fact, reports from Baghdad say US troops have been standing aside, rightly worried that intervention would increase people's anger. If they can do nothing now, why expect anything else if things worsen?

Better for the US to seize the opportunity to put troop withdrawal on the table. Instead of haggling over government portfolios - which only postpones the inevitable - Iraq needs a reconciliation conference that all parties, including radical nationalists such as Sadr as well as Sunni insurgents, would be urged to attend. Its central item would be stark. What form of national salvation government could Iraqis agree to, knowing that by midsummer all occupation forces would have left? Faced with the reality of no more US and UK troops, the secondary questions follow. What would be the role of militias/insurgents? Should they disband, with some gunmen incorporated into a national army, or should they be "re-badged" as local forces to confront the minority of al-Qaida activists in Iraq? Can a UN force manned mainly by Muslim nations play a security role?

Only by ending the occupation can the ideological base be cut from under the foreign jihadis and their terror bombings. Only when Iraq's leaders accept they are on their own will they have a strong enough incentive to work together to save their faltering country.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk