Word: clerics
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...ever quite sure where al-Sadr stands. The rebellious Shi'ite cleric is a master of the mixed message, and last week he flipped so often between vows of violence and offers to negotiate that even when the two-week-old standoff between his Mahdi Army and combined U.S. and Iraqi-government forces seemed about to end, it wasn't clear if it had. Did he really intend to quit the shrine? Or was he actually planning to resume combat, as he later urged his followers, against the enemy forces still poised outside? As one of his spokesmen, Sheik Ahmed...
...retreat, the struggle for control of the country is far from over. Resolution of the standoff in Najaf may help boost the legitimacy of the interim U.S.-backed government and its Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, among Iraqis fed up with al-Sadr's truculence. And yet the renegade cleric still commands thousands of fervent followers willing to take up arms anytime at his order, and his strident defiance of the U.S. has won him an even greater number of noncombat supporters. Even an inconclusive truce boosts his stature: as long as the militant cleric gets away to fight another...
That's the dilemma that vexes the U.S. and its allies as they try to quell the guerrilla campaign across Iraq that shows few signs of abating. U.S. commanders say they have inflicted punishing blows to al-Sadr's army; the military claims that hundreds of the cleric's fighters have been killed in the fighting in Najaf. But the fear of alienating peaceful Shi'ites forced the Allawi government to hold back from its threats to launch a decisive strike against rebels inside the shrine. And so late last week, even as al-Sadr claimed to be handing over...
...equation. Sistani has demanded that the U.S. and Iraqi forces withdraw from around the mosque and that Sadr's gunmen leave before he'll enter. The U.S. and the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi may have no option but to comply, because alienating Sistani, the most influential cleric in Iraq, would be political suicide. Getting Sadr's fighters out of the mosque would, of course, accomplish one of the government's primary objectives. Doing so along the lines suggested by Sistani, however, also helps Sadr...
...recognized and venerated - even as it is, effect, challenged to move in a more radical direction - by Sadr's movement. Sistani is a "Marjah," an object of emulation in the Shiite tradition, whose position is attained through decades of patient learning and Islamic jurisprudence. Sadr is a junior cleric, although his supporters have taken to referring to him as a Hujjat al-Islam, or jurisprudent, the next step up the ladder, although most observers doubt he has completed the requisite studies...