Moqtada al-Sadr - Tag Search

Polls closed in Iraq a few minutes ago after 10 hours of voting. The ballot was marred by a few dozen insurgent attacks around the country -- but casualties are remarkably low, and voter turnout (anecdotally at least) seems to be fairly high.

We'll update this thread throughout the day with new developments. Today's news will largely come from non-Iraqi sources: Many Iraqi newspapers suspended publication for the day to allow their staffs time to vote. Here's Al-Rafidayn's statement on the suspension (عربي), for example; As-Sabaah has a banner across its homepage (عربي). So most of today's news comes from Western and pan-Arab news sources.

Iraq's Supreme Court has reportedly reissued a six-year-old warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr's arrest.

This story isn't getting much attention in the English-language media -- everyone's focused on the Diyala bombings (more on those soon) -- but it has the potential to be quite significant.

The warrant is for the 2003 murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a pro-American Shi'ite cleric who was hacked to death by a mob in Najaf. The Coalition Provisional Authority issued a warrant for Sadr's arrest in 2004, but he was never arrested, and the warrant was eventually buried as part of a reconciliation deal with his Mahdi Army.

The Iraqi prime minister is getting hammered from all sides this morning. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister and head of the Iraqiyya coalition, accuses Maliki of staging a coup (عربي) against a "peaceful transfer of power" in Iraq.

"The government has made a decision, in collusion with suspicious forces inside and outside Iraq, to exclude important politicians from participating in the political process. The Iraqi people know this is a conspiracy to ignore the will of voters and to exclude opponents of the parties in power... it is a preemptive coup."

Then we have Motqada al-Sadr, who condemns the Maliki government (عربي) for failing to protect the Iraqi people from ongoing violence. "Shame, all shame" on Maliki, Sadr says, "and the blood of the people is on... this government."

Too early to tell if this has any significance, but several inmates started a prison riot at Abu Ghraib yesterday. They set a fire in their cell, then tried to overpower the guards who came to put out the fire. Eventually the guards started shooting and "an unspecified number of inmates" were killed.

Prison riots are not uncommon in Iraq, or in any country with prisons, for that matter. The Iraqi inmates were allegedly protesting poor conditions in Abu Ghraib.

If the rioting inmates were Sunnis, then the riot might fit into the broader perception of the Shi'ite-dominated government riding roughshod over the Sunni minority. But it sounds like the inmates were Shi'ites affiliated with Moqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat has the first confirmation I've seen that Moqtada al-Sadr's party wants to join the Shi'ite alliance announced yesterday.

The confirmation comes in an interview with Asmaa al-Mousawi, a high-ranking member of the party, who said the group received "assurances" from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the other coalition member.

"It is expected that some high-ranking positions will be obtained, depending upon [a candidates] competency. In the past, the US occupation prevented [the Sadrist trend from participating in government] but following the withdrawal of US forces, there is nothing to prevent the Sadrist trend from participating in government," al-Mousawi said.

Sadr's movement backed out of the United Iraqi Alliance in 2007 because it felt the coalition was too dominated by other parties (ISCI and Maliki's Dawa party).

Bloomberg has some more detail on the alleged ISCI/Sadr alliance. It was announced today at a press conference called by Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the former Iraqi prime minister. Also at the press conference were Adel Abdel Mahdi, an ISCI member, and Ahmed Chalabi, everyone's favorite ideologically-flexible Iraqi politician.

Notably absent: Anyone from the Sadrist movement.

Well, well. Interesting news out of Iraq this morning, where the Washington Post reports that prime minister Nouri al-Maliki will not be part of a proposed coalition government of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Moqtada al-Sadr's political party. But how significant is this?

Let's begin with a caveat: This ISCI-Sadr alliance hasn't actually happened yet. It could very well fall through; the two parties have clashed in the past, for example in Najaf, where Sadr's group has tried to build its influence and undermine ISCI. Or the alliance could hold and Maliki's Dawa party could join it. Such was the rumor last month, when Sadr said he was considering an alliance with both parties.

That said, if this report is true, it suggests two things about Maliki: The other two Shi'ite parties view him as a liability, and he's still confident about his own position.

The New York Times this morning makes the same observation I made yesterday: Despite the huge amount of anti-Shi'a violence over the last two months, Iraq's Shi'a population has exercised tremendous restraint. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has cautioned against any violent retaliation; Shi'a militia groups have not surfaced.

Even Moqtada's counseling caution:

"Sayid Moktada al-Sadr has told us in his instructions that we have to follow the orders of the howza," said Sheik Jalil al-Sarkhey, the deputy head of the Sadr office in Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum in Baghdad. "We are all agreed; there will be no spilling of Iraqi blood."

Still, the pessimist in me wonders how long this will last. The Times mentions the 2006 shrine bombing in Samarra as a sort of spark that caused an explosion of sectarian violence. But tensions had been brewing for two years before the Samarra bombing -- they provided the fuel for this hypothetical explosion.

I can't help but wonder if we're building towards a similar tipping point.

While Al-Maliki is in Washington, Moqtada al-Sadr is visiting a "number of Arab countries," according to an Al-Sharq Al-Awsat report. He's in Syria right now; al-Sadr met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad earlier this week.

It's hard to separate fact from speculation -- the article is heavy on the latter -- but it seems Moqtada is thinking about joining a coalition with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. And there are rumors that he's also considering an alliance with Dawa (which already runs candidates with ISCI, under the United Iraqi Alliance coalition).

If those rumors are true, Iraq would have a unified coalition of Shi'a parties running candidates in 2010.