Showdown With The Rebel

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.