Hezbollah on the Tigris?

Like the militant Lebanese group, fiery cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr is using both guns and butter to seize power in Iraq.

By David Enders

Read more: Politics, Saddam Hussein, News, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Muqtada al-Sadr

AP Photo/Nabil Al-Jurani

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr speaks to his supporters in Basra, 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006.

May 8, 2006 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Ghaith Al-Tamimi used to live with his wife and two young sons in a tiny two-room apartment above a garage in Sadr City, the vast north Baghdad slum that was built for 200,000 people but holds 10 times that. There was no running water in Tamimi's apartment, and his sons had no place to play.

That was before Tamimi, an organizer in the movement of the fiercely nationalist and anti-occupation cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, led hundreds of al-Sadr followers out of Sadr City and "took back" a Sunni mosque in a mixed middle-class neighborhood near Palestine Street, a major thoroughfare south of Sadr City. In one of a number of such mosque seizures that followed the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra, al-Sadr's militiamen kicked out the Sunni imam's family and installed Tamimi as the new imam. (The New York Times' Edward Wong reported on the incident. )

Tamimi moved into the house on the mosque grounds. Now his children play in the mosque and a sprinkler waters the lawn. Tamimi, who is a member of al-Sadr's media and education office, crows about the work he and his men are doing for the neighborhood.

"Yesterday an electrical line broke in the neighborhood," Tamimi said. "It might have taken weeks to get it fixed. But I called one of my friends in the ministry of electricity, and it was fixed the same day."

In Sadr City and other Shiite slums, al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Jeish al-Mahdi) operates openly. Not here: The guards at the mosque are heavily armed and the streets leading to the mosque have been blocked off. The mosque feels almost as much like a forward operating base as a house of worship.

The mosque episode is just one example of the way the Sadrieen, as Muqtada al-Sadr's followers are known, are steadily gaining power. In Iraq's constantly shifting political landscape, the fiery young cleric whose militia fought the U.S. twice in 2004 is bidding to become a key player. Al-Sadr has a two-pronged strategy: vehemently resisting the U.S. occupation, while providing social services for the poor and assisting the thousands of Shiite families displaced by sectarian attacks. It's a tactic that reminds many of that employed by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that is credited with driving the Israeli Army out of south Lebanon and is now a powerful Lebanese political party. Indeed, if anything, al-Sadr is on a faster track -- Hezbollah did not enter the Lebanese government until 1996.

To be sure, al-Sadr and his followers face significant challenges that Hezbollah did not, notably a vicious retaliatory war with Sunni insurgents and a Shiite population that is not unified. Al-Sadr is locked in a power struggle with the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq Party, the leading Shiite organization. Al-Sadr's followers may be devoted, but the young leader does not have the prestige or the respect of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric who has an uneasy relationship with al-Sadr and could clip his wings. Unlike Hezbollah, al-Sadr's movement does not enjoy the support of Iran. And the election of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who replaced Sadr's ally Ibrahim Jaafari, leaves Iraq's political future undecided. Key issues like federalism, the role of militias, the fate of Kirkuk, how to deal with escalating tit-for-tat killings, attempts to bring Sunni insurgents into the political process and, of course, the future of the American occupation could play out in ways that could diminish (or enhance) al-Sadr's power.

However, in Iraq facts on the ground are usually decisive. And al-Sadr is moving more quickly than any other leader to fill the void left by the barely functioning Iraqi government. At the very least, it seems certain that al-Sadr and his followers -- nationalist, militant, vehemently anti-American and anti-Israeli, and strongly religious -- will be significant players in the new Iraq, whatever form it takes.

The mosque takeover followed the Feb. 22 bombing of the revered Askariya shrine in Samarra, a Shiite pilgrimage site in a restive city with a majority Sunni population an hour north of Baghdad. The Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias attacked many Sunni mosques in Baghdad and killed a number of Sunnis. Some of those attacks, including Tamimi's, appear to have been less than spontaneous. (Al-Sadr's followers have long wanted these mosques back, and indeed had seized other mosques in 2003. Also, I spoke with a Sunni sheik who said that some members of the Mahdi Army had warned people that other Mahdi cells were going to attack them. In the light of these facts, Samarra seems more like a pretext than a catalyst.)

Tamimi said that the mosque he now occupies had been taken from a Shiite cleric in 1980, during one of Saddam Hussein's purges of politically active Shiite Islamists.

"We had a court decision saying that the mosque would be given back to us," Tamimi said. "It was supposed to be given back to us [at the beginning of March] anyway. We just took it back early." (In his New York Times piece, Wong reported that a former Shiite lawyer who claimed Saddam stripped the mosque from him possessed documents showing that the judge had indeed ruled in his favor.)

Hazem Al-Aaraji, an al-Sadr spokesman in Baghdad, said that "20 or 30" mosques have recently been taken back, and that the Sadrieen are attempting to have others returned.

Next page: Sadr City increasingly feels like southern Beirut -- Hezbollah's base