Al-Maliki is from the revolutionary Islamic Dawa Party, founded in the late 1950s to establish an Islamic state in Iraq. His B.A. is from the Usul al-Din College in Baghdad, a seminary founded in 1964 by clerical Dawa leader Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. (He also holds a master's degree in Arabic literature.)
Al-Maliki spent two decades in exile, at first in Iran but then mainly in Baathist Syria. The 1980s were times of severe conflict between the Iraqi Dawa and the United States. Dawa operatives in Lebanon helped to form the radical Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1984. But if Washington seems willing to forgive Maliki for whatever he did in Damascus, Sunni Arab Iraqis may not have such short memories.
Since his return to Iraq in 2003, Al-Maliki has emerged as one of the few publicly identifiable faces of the secretive Dawa Party, serving on its politburo and then as a member of parliament since early 2005. He was deeply involved in the Committee for Debaathification, which took a punitive stance toward Sunni Arabs who had been members of the Baath Party, regardless of whether they could be shown to have been guilty of wrongdoing. Some 100,000 Sunni Iraqis are said to have lost their jobs since the fall of the old regime, and each supported a large number of family and clan members.
Al-Maliki is such a strong Shiite partisan that when he was asked at the time of the January 2005 elections about the strengths of the United Iraqi Alliance, he replied, "One other strong point is the fact that this list has received the endorsement of the religious authority." He was proud of the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to put the party in power, a move deeply criticized by Sunni Arabs and secularists. He helped to craft the constitution that forbade the parliament from contravening Islamic canon law. In fall of 2005, he let it be known that he was far more impatient with the continued American occupation than are the Kurds. "At the end of the remaining period of time, that is, at the end of the constitutional process and elections and the advent of a new government, we will come face to face with the pressing need of telling the occupation and foreign forces that the process is over. We have reached the shore of safety we sought to reach and there must be withdrawal."
Al-Maliki has a lot of fences to mend with politicians of the other ethnic and religious groups, and his Dawa Party does not even see eye to eye on some pivotal issues with Shiite allies such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). But whether the new political class can overcome its grudges is less important than the downward spiral in the security situation and basic living conditions during the five months since the election, as Iraq has remained rudderless.
Observers on the ground note a new ugliness to the attitudes of many Shiite Iraqis to the continued U.S. troop presence in their country. Shiites south of Baghdad for the most part enjoy fair security, most of it apparently supplied by religious militias, and therefore do not feel that they need foreign troops. Anti-Americanism and anti-Western feeling has grown with the revelations of American torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and U.S. bombardment of Shiite cities such as Kut and Najaf during the uprisings of the Mahdi Army militia in 2004.
On Sunday, a bomb killed 15 and wounded many more in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the center of Shiite Islam's cult of martyrs. Such atrocities raise for Shiites the question of what the U.S. military is good for, if it cannot forestall them. The previous day, Los Angeles Times correspondent Borzou Daragahi had reported from Karbala the observations of one Jaffar Mohammed Asadi about the mood in the shrine city. He quoted Asadi as saying, "There is an anger ... You can hear it in the slogans at Friday prayers: 'Death to America' ... They're burning American flags. They're saying, 'The Americans won't leave except by the funerals of their sons.' "
These chilling observations appeared in print the very day that a new round of deadly Shiite militia and mob violence broke out in the southern port of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. An unknown guerrilla group shot down a British military helicopter and killing 5 British soldiers on Saturday.
A crowd of hundreds of Shiite youth gathered to celebrate and to chant anti-British slogans. They probably belong to a splinter group of the Sadr movement, led by dissident Sheikh Ahmad al-Fartusi, who is even more militant than Muqtada al-Sadr. They chanted that they were all soldiers of "the Sayyid," probably a reference to Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed in 1999, probably by Saddam's secret police. Basra Sadrists tend to reject the leadership of the ayatollah's young son, Muqtada, who is popular in the slums of East Baghdad and southern cities such as Amara.
When British search and rescue teams showed up, the mob attacked them with stones and Molotov cocktails, and a paramilitary got off some mortar rounds. Several British soldiers were wounded, and their vehicles set afire. Either as a result of British fire or because they were caught in the cross-fire with the militia, five Iraqi civilians were left dead and 28 wounded. In the aftermath, a group calling itself the National Front for the Liberation of Iraq, implausibly led by a Sunni named Musa al-Hadithi, distributed pamphlets throughout the city demanding an immediate British departure, and warning of severe consequences otherwise. Although a draconian curfew and the deployment of Basra security forces dampened tensions, resentment of the foreign presence will likely persist.
Actually, the British benefited from the rivalry among Shiite militias, some of which are less militant than others. The security forces have been infiltrated by the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which holds 20 of the 41 seats on the provincial council, and by militiamen loyal to the Fadilah or Virtue Party, which reveres Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr but rejects his son, Muqtada. Fadilah is the most moderate of the Sadr movements, and deeply disapproves of al-Fartusi's group and its violence.
Meanwhile, the daily horror show in Iraq continues. Mostly fundamentalist political parties dither and jockey for position behind their downtown barricades, while armed gangs kill with impunity. On Sunday alone, 51 bodies showed up dead in the streets of the capital. Baghdad police have regularized the custom of the morning "corpse patrol," in the course of which victims of the country's low-intensity sectarian civil war are discovered, hands bound and a bullet behind the ear. The reprisal killings by religious militias have forced some 100,000 Iraqis from their homes since the bombing in late February of the sacred Askariyah Shrine of the Shiites in Samarra, according to Iraqi government estimates.
The lack of security has kept the economy a basket case. A third of Iraqi children are malnourished, according to UNICEF. The guerrillas' successful siege of the capital has reduced electricity availability to only three hours a day in the midst of a scorching summer, causing food to spoil. Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reported this week that services in the capital are at an all-time low. The ethnic cleansing of mixed Baghdad provinces is proceeding apace, with minority Shiites or Sunnis being forced out.
That the new Iraq's seething religious and ethnic hatreds and the increasing mobilization of neighborhood-based militias can be fought by appointing a technocrat as minister of the interior, or by installing new ministers of trade or transport, beggars belief. The nightmare seems destined to continue.
About the writer
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).
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