Advertisement

Aide to Top Shiite Cleric in Iraq Slain

Share
Times Staff Writers

A representative of Iraq’s leading cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was assassinated near the capital Thursday, a development that further unsettled the strife-torn country as it prepared for elections.

The killing pointed to Sistani’s central role in a preelection struggle in which a Sunni-dominated insurgency has waged a campaign of bombings, assassinations and other acts of intimidation to disrupt Iraq’s first free national election in half a century.

Sheik Mahmoud Madaini, Sistani’s representative in the town of Salman Pak, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, was gunned down as he returned home from a mosque shortly after he presided over evening prayers. Madaini’s son and four bodyguards also were killed.

Advertisement

Sistani, arguably the most powerful figure in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, is the senior Shiite Muslim cleric in a country where Shiites constitute about 60% of the population. The favorite to win the most seats in the 275-member transitional national assembly in the Jan. 30 election is a slate of mainly Shiite candidates known as the United Iraqi Alliance, but usually referred to as “Sistani’s list” because he is thought to favor it.

The cleric is not a candidate, though he has vigorously supported the election and resisted calls for its postponement.

Neither police nor the Interior Ministry responded to questions about the incident, and by late Thursday, no group had claimed responsibility for the killings.

Although there is a history of violence among feuding Shiite groups, recent attacks against Sistani’s associates are widely believed to be the work of Sunni Muslim insurgents.

Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for several attacks against prominent figures, including the assassination of Baghdad’s provincial governor, Ali Haidari, last week.

Madaini was the latest of several Sistani representatives who have been assassinated. Sheik Hussein Harithi, a Sistani representative in Baghdad, was killed in June in a neighborhood west of the capital after participating in a forum on the elections.

Advertisement

There have been several attempts to kill Sheik Abdul Mehdi Karbalai, Sistani’s representative in the Shiite holy city of Karbala. In the most recent attack, just a month ago, a bomb outside a mosque killed seven people and wounded Karbalai and dozens of others.

Aides close to Sistani said Thursday’s assassination would not affect the cleric’s determination to go through with the election on time.

“The election process will still go on,” declared an official in Sistani’s office who declined to provide his name.

Officials at Sistani’s headquarters in the holy city of Najaf speculated that Madaini was killed because he was a relatively easy target. The area just south of Baghdad where the assassination took place has been the scene of so many bombings and killings in recent months that it has become known as the “triangle of death.”

Despite his power, Sistani has opted against taking political office or playing a visible role in the political jostling to fill the power vacuum left after Hussein’s ouster. Unlike Iran’s powerful ayatollahs, Sistani does not advocate an Islamic theocracy, believing instead that clerics should involve themselves more with social than political issues.

He possesses an ability to marshal thousands -- peaceful protests have given him virtual veto power over U.S. electoral planning -- and has rankled American officials by refusing to meet directly with them. He displayed this power last year in almost single-handedly scuttling the election formula proposed by former Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer III that called for a series of regional caucuses to select a national parliament.

Advertisement

With United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi as a go-between, U.S. officials settled on a compromise acceptable to the cleric: a six-month delay in exchange for direct elections by the end of January.

Last summer, Sistani brokered a peace agreement that ended a weeks-long siege of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf by supporters of militant Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. Late last year, calls for a postponement of the vote, including an arms-length endorsement of a delay by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s party, largely died in the face of Sistani’s opposition.

A British official Thursday declared, “The debate on any delay in the election is over.”

Still, violence and intimidation are taking their toll. Two senior U.S. military commanders, U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte and Nineveh Gov. Duraid Kashmoula met Thursday in Mosul with two Iraqi election officials to discuss the poll. All but two of more than 700 election workers in the area resigned last month, said Maj. Tony Cruz of the 426 Civil Affairs Battalion, who was at the meeting.

In an effort to recruit election workers, the local government and the Iraqi electoral commission will roll out ads in newspapers and on TV and radio in the next two weeks, Cruz said.

Sistani’s role as unofficial godfather of the Shiite powerhouse United Iraqi Alliance has been a growing source of controversy. Although Sistani and his aides played a direct role in assembling the list, the cleric has never directly endorsed it, limiting his statements to general calls for all Iraqis to participate as part of their patriotic and religious duties.

But the use of Sistani’s picture to promote alliance candidates has prompted complaints. Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, lodged a complaint over what he considered a violation of the electoral ban on religious symbols in campaigning.

Advertisement

Adil Lami, a member of the electoral commission, said the commission’s rules ban the use of religious symbols such as crosses or pictures of the Koran in campaign material. The use of Sistani’s image would constitute a violation, but Lami said he wasn’t aware of any such cases.

On Tuesday, the Iraqi List slate headed by Allawi issued a statement protesting the use of Sistani’s image in alliance materials, pointing out that the cleric is “not nominated on or supporting this list” or any other specific slate.

One of the leading members of the alliance, national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie, complained in a December interview that alliance candidates had not bothered to put together a coherent platform and seemed to be counting on riding into parliament on Sistani’s prestige.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Thursday, a Turkish businessman whose company was believed to be working on a U.S.-financed reconstruction project was kidnapped and his Iraqi driver and five company employees were shot dead outside a hotel in central Baghdad. In Baqubah, about 25 miles northeast of Baghdad, a provincial councilman was slain outside his home.

Also in the Baqubah area, two bombs exploded, one of them killing a policeman. Reports on the second, in the village of Khan Beni Saad, on the road to Baghdad south of the city, remained sketchy late Thursday, but the device was believed to have claimed the lives of three people and injured more than 15.

*

Times staff writer Louise Roug in Mosul and a special correspondent in Najaf contributed to this report.

Advertisement
Advertisement