Showdown With The Rebel

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ll 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.