Moderates in Retreat in Najaf as Fear Echoes Across the City

Shops have been shuttered and few of this holy city’s genteel residents are venturing out this week as armed young men, clad in black, their faces half-hidden by head scarves, stream into the city.

The armed men are loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr, who views the United States as the “biggest devil.” They surrounded one of the most holy sites in Shiite Islam, the gold-domed mosque of Imam Ali, and opened an office for the “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” inside its walls. They forced their way into police stations, commandeering cars, jeeps, weapons and even the bulletproof vests procured by the Americans for the nascent Iraqi force.

In the face of the incursion, natives of this city -- one of the intellectual centers of Shiite Islam -- fell silent, afraid to protest. Their fear echoed across Iraq this week as moderates confronted the reality that they were up against countrymen with guns who appear to have little compunction about using them.

In trying to rebuild Iraq, the United States has depended heavily on what it views as a moderate majority -- people who reject both dictatorship and religious extremism -- especially among Shiites, who make up a majority of the country’s people. U.S. officials and Iraqis who are close to them insist that the majority of Iraqis want a democratic, secular government.

But recent events suggest that the Americans might have underestimated the number of Iraqis sympathetic to opponents of the U.S.-led coalition, even if they are radicals, and that moderates may not be inclined to speak up in support of the occupation administration.

Abu Nouras, a bookseller in Najaf, considers himself part of the moderate Shiite majority, and he is upset by Sadr’s takeover of the city. He believes that the silent majority still will have its day.

Silence Is Wise

“The people who are silent are the people who will make history,” he said. However, he added: “Sometimes it is wiser to stay silent because, if we speak, there might be fighting among the Shiites.”

Events in Najaf, as well as Sadr’s effort to reach out to Sunni Muslims battling U.S. forces elsewhere in Iraq, bring the main conflict in the country into sharp relief, said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council, the only major Iraqi institution to speak out against Sadr.

“In the end, the confrontation will be essentially between moderates and extremists on both sides -- Sunni and Shiite,” Pachachi said. “It is between fundamentalism and liberal secularism.”

Shiite and Sunni Muslims have only sporadically been rivals for power in Iraq, although their fortunes sharply diverged under Saddam Hussein, when Shiites were brutally repressed. But now signs are increasingly emerging of links between Sadr and the Sunni Muslim insurgency in Fallouja and other towns.

Sadr has issued several statements praising the insurgents in Fallouja, while the guerrillas have sent messages to Sadr, one of which was read over the loudspeaker at his mosque in a Baghdad ghetto saying: “From your brothers in Fallouja. We are with you under the banner of ‘God is greatest’ and the mantle of Islam.”

A meeting of anti-American Sunnis, Shiites and Palestinians was planned for today in the Baghdad neighborhood, Sadr City, named for the cleric’s assassinated father.

For the United States, the key question is whether there really is a silent majority of moderates that would like to see Sadr sidelined.

Earlier this week, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that there were only about 1,000 to 6,000 militia members supporting Sadr.

But that number now appears to represent a serious miscalculation of the radical cleric’s appeal, especially among impoverished young men. Some academics calculate that Sadr commands support from as much as one-third of the Shiite population.

By midweek, there were several hundred militiamen visible in Najaf and nearby Kufa alone. Thousands more armed Sadr supporters were active in the urban southern Shiite strongholds of Nasiriya, Amarah, Kut and Diwaniya, as well as in the Baghdad slum bearing the Sadr name.

Trouble in Kut

In Kut on Wednesday, Sadr supporters were reported to have ousted Ukrainian troops -- part of the U.S.-led force -- from their base, broken in and stolen whatever they could.

Sadr’s forces are untrained and ill equipped, suggesting that they could do little to defend him if U.S. troops tried to take him on directly. But their existence intimidates those who do not have weapons, and inspires larger numbers of jobless young men to join his cause.

There have been relatively few instances in which Sadr followers killed fellow Muslims. But there has been mob violence, as when a crowd fatally stabbed moderate Shiite cleric Abdul Majid Khoei during the war last spring.

“I know someone who was there and saw with his own eyes what happened to Khoei,” said Abu Hussein, who owns a guesthouse for religious pilgrims in Najaf. “It was a terrifying sight. I was never so terrified by Saddam [Hussein] as I was by [hearing about] that.”

Few of the moderate Shiite clergy, who command broad popular allegiance, have been willing to speak out against Sadr. There is also an absence of broadly popular secular leaders.

That leaves the United States isolated in its determination to remove Sadr from the political scene and with few surrogates to explain its position to the Iraqi people.

It is widely believed that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a moderate with little patience for the U.S. occupation, is the only person to whom the young Sadr might listen.

But Sistani, it appears, has made the calculation that he has more to lose by attempting to isolate Sadr -- mainly because speaking out against Sadr could easily be construed as support for the Americans.

“We are against Muqtader, but we are also against the way our people are being treated by the Americans.... There was open fire in Sadr City on innocent victims,” said Sheik Fatih Kashif Ghitaa, a cleric and top staffer for Governing Council member Salama Khafaji, who is a Shiite. He was referring to a shootout Sunday between U.S. troops and militias in the heavily Shiite Baghdad slum.

Sistani issued a short and carefully worded statement Wednesday, criticizing the occupation forces but urging peace. He only obliquely criticized Sadr’s recent takeover of police and other government offices.

It is also difficult for Sistani or any other Shiite cleric to move against Sadr because of his pedigree. Sadr’s father was a popular ayatollah who was killed by Hussein’s agents.

Sistani and Sadr also have a strained history. The young cleric’s father, one of the most revered figures in modern Shiite history, was one of Sistani’s rawest critics, accusing him of cowardice in the face of Hussein.

The younger Sadr’s followers threatened to force Sistani into exile shortly after the execution of Khoei. Only the action of Euphrates River tribesmen loyal to Sistani saved him.

“Ayatollah Sistani doesn’t want to antagonize a large portion of those he perceives to be his constituency: the religious establishment of the Shiites,” Pachachi said.

A handful of clerics rushed to Najaf in the last two days to try to negotiate Sadr’s surrender and avoid further bloodshed. But so far, it appeared, they had made little headway.

“America hasn’t given us any time to solve this problem,” Ghitaa said.

Seyyid Mohammed Bahr Uloom, a Shiite cleric and member of the Iraqi Governing Council, spent Wednesday in Najaf trying to negotiate with Sadr. The goal was to find a way for him to surrender without being humiliated in front of his followers, say clerics and others close to the situation.

A deadline for Sadr to surrender expired Wednesday night, and Najaf residents were fearfully waiting for an attack by U.S. commandos.

“We will attack to destroy the Mahdi army [Sadr’s force],” Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top U.S. military spokesman, told a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday. He acknowledged such a move might motivate some Iraqis to join the insurgency, but said that would be a bad idea.

“They want to fight? Fight for what?” Kimmitt said. “To bring in an authoritarian regime? To bring in a religious extremist regime? For civil war?”

Council Speaks

After coming under pressure from coalition members, the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council issued a statement Wednesday calling on Sadr to stop breaking the law and working against popular interests.

In addition to being accused of manslaughter in the murder of Khoei, Governing Council members say he is accused of running illegal courts, prisons and torture chambers.

The statement paid homage to Sadr’s father but said the son was exploiting his father’s name.

Although the Governing Council’s statement was strongly worded, the group’s closeness to the U.S.-led occupation diminishes its sway among those who are on the fence, while to Sadr sympathizers its members appear as mere collaborators.

And even in Najaf, where locals grumbled about their city’s takeover by Sadr’s black-clad militia and clerics loyal to him, there was little willingness to speak out against him.

“I am a son of Najaf. My father and my father’s father and his father were all from this place. We are educated people,” said Abu Mustapha, who was trained as an engineer but would not give his full name.

“We cannot accept that the Americans would come here and defile our shrine and storm our streets. Even though we hate [Sadr] -- this would be unbearable.”

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

In stories after April 9, 2004, Shiite cleric Muqtader Sadr is correctly referred to as Muqtada Sadr.

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