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Challenges to Shiite Establishment Further Threaten the Future of Iraq - New York Times

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Middle East |Challenges to Shiite Establishment Further Threaten the Future of Iraq



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Factions Split Iraq’s Shiite Establishment



Factions Split Iraq’s Shiite Establishment


Lynsey Addario for The New York Times











NAJAF, Iraq — From his modest office in the shrine city of Najaf, Iraq’s highest religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, leader of the country’s Shiite establishment, issued a call to arms asking his followers to join with the government military to stop the blitzkrieg by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.


But one cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, who led a militia that fought the government and lost in 2008, decided instead that he too would challenge the state. Mr. Sadr revived his Mahdi Army, possibly one of the largest and most experienced battle groups in Iraq, and announced that under no circumstances would it be under the control of the government.



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His open challenge to Iraq’s Shiite establishment lays bare the latest in a series of cracks that are dividing the country’s three main ethnic groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, as the Iraqi state comes unraveled. But as Mr. Sadr’s actions show, the fault lines are not strictly between religious and ethnic groups, but also within each group, a fracturing that could lead Iraq to even greater chaos and uncertainty.



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After the United States military invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Shiite south was badly divided among different factions, including those loyal to Ayatollah Sistani and Mr. Sadr. But in recent years, largely because of Ayatollah Sistani’s efforts, militias were disbanded and a rocky unifying process was underway. For a time, it appeared as if Shiites might behave as a unified force with a Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad and a revered religious figure, Ayatollah Sistani, coaxing them to work together.


The return of Mr. Sadr’s militia, however, is undoing that, even his former supporters say, with one ayatollah warning that the country is about to “fall into the abyss.” The splintering of the Shiite south into different groups will make it even harder to keep the state together, he and others said, creating conflicts within conflicts in the quest for territory and power.


“We are worried and afraid,” said Ayatollah Kassim Altaai, a cleric who supported Mr. Sadr in the past but split with him.



Mr. Sadr, a young and ambitious cleric who spent years in neighboring Iran studying theology, surprised many in February when he said he was retiring from politics, though he had some loyalists running in the parliamentary elections in April.


On Saturday he was back with his forces parading in several cities showing off homemade rockets as divisions of would-be fighters filed by in what looked like suicide belts. In a statement released on Sunday, Mr. Sadr announced that his forces would not in any way be under government control. “Despite the disagreements of some friends and enemies of the parade, you showed strength and power — you terrified them,” he told his volunteer fighters.


In Najaf, a 1,000-year-old center of Shiite learning, it is common for clerics to have differences, but faced with the threat of the radical jihadist group that adheres to a fierce anti-Shiite ideology and has threatened to destroy Iraq’s Shiite holy shrines, all leading clerics, or “marjaiye,” as they are called here, have closed ranks behind Ayatollah Sistani.



But while the establishment has rallied to Ayatollah Sistani, Mr. Sadr has not.


“With the return of the militias, the state will be further undermined,” said one high official in the office of Ayatollah Sistani, asking not to be named so as not to alienate other leaders. “If we want a strong Iraq, we need a strong state. Putting these armed groups on the street is not our way.”


Until now there has been no fighting in Iraq’s south with its majority Shiite population. There is little police presence in Najaf, and Iraq’s national army is nowhere to be seen. Few pilgrims visit the holy shrine of the first saint of the Shiites, Imam Ali, these days, with foreign visitors scared off by the news coming out of Iraq. Bored security guards give some of the pilgrims a quick stroke over their back to check for suicide belts as they enter the shrine’s magnificent courtyard, but many walk in unchecked.


“Thank God we are safe here because of Ayatollah Sistani’s call to defend Iraq,” said Ali Najafi, the son of Grand Ayatollah Basheer Hussein Najafi, who supports Ayatollah Sistani. Now that the country is under threat, Mr. Najafi said it was better not to criticize each other. “Unfortunately some have other ideas and deal with this issue differently,” he said of Mr. Sadr.





OPEN Graphic



Graphic: In Iraq Crisis, a Tangle of Alliances and Enmities


Despite the seeming calm in the city, groups of armed men have been enlisting at special recruitment centers, allocated by Ayatollah Sistani and the traditional clerics. All followed Ayatollah Sistani’s decree, saying the fight is for the defense of Iraq, and not for the cause of Shiism.


As the sun was setting over the Sea of Najaf on Sunday, a group of around 500 men had assembled at a massive oasis at the foot of the hill where the shrine of Imam Ali is located.


Waving huge Iraqi flags, the men stood in formation when Zuhair Sharba, a shrine official, addressed them. “If you want to be an Iraqi, be with us,” he thundered. “If you do not want to be an Iraqi, we have our opinion of you. In the coming days it will be clear who the genuine sons of Iraq are.”


The men would be armed soon, a general in the Iraqi Army promised. “A crown, a crown, a crown on the head of Ali Sistani,” the volunteers shouted in answer.


During Mr. Sadr’s parade a day earlier, a group of clerics loyal to him, wearing military uniforms under their turbans, shouted in favor of their own leader. “I will purify Mosul, I am a Sadrist,” they said, following a drill instructor, who was also wearing a turban.


Publicly Mr. Sadr says that he has embraced Iraqi’s national identity and that he is against all forms of sectarianism. He has renamed his revived army “the peace brigades” that will protect the shrines, churches and other holy places in Iraq.


Still, the militia’s violent history speaks to a very different agenda. Since its establishment in 2003, the Mahdi Army has been engaged in battles with United States forces and other Shiite militias. It played a role in sectarian killings and was defeated in 2008 when government forces fought the group in the southern city of Basra. After that Mr. Sadr decided to disband the militia.



Though he has brought his fighters back on the streets, that does not mean the militia has returned, Mr. Sadr’s spokesman, Salah al-Obeidi, said in his office in Najaf. “We are back to help defend the shrines,” he said.


His leader had ordered the militia to cooperate when necessary with security forces, the spokesman explained. But being under the control of the Iraqi security officials is no option. “They are corrupt and can’t be trusted,” Mr. Obeidi said. “Why would we fight for them?”


“Some old clerics see the need for a defensive jihad, but we say, ‘If someone breaks into your house, do you need a religious decree to kick him out?’ No,” the spokesman added.


In Ayatollah Sistani’s office, a dozen men stood guard holding machine guns and checking all visitors down to the rings on their fingers. The high official spoke softly. “We have our disagreements with the government; they have made many mistakes,” he said. “But for now the framework of the state is all we have. If armed groups step in now, all will be lost.”



A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2014, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Challenges to Shiite Establishment Further Threaten the Future of Iraq.




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