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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...
...trial of strength didn't turn out to be easy at all. A tactical victory at the shrine would rouse wholesale Shi'ite resistance to his government. A decision to back down would destroy Allawi's ability to impose order on insurgents across the country. At the Pentagon, officials were keen to be done with al-Sadr once and for all but acknowledged it would take an unacceptable level of force to do the job. They insisted that they were not calling the shots: any decision to storm the mosque would be Allawi's. The Prime Minister declared that...
Critics say al-Sadr had another motivation in putting himself forward: money. The millions of Shi'ite pilgrims who visit the shrine in Najaf are required to pay a tithe to the Hawza, the supreme Iraqi Shi'ite religious authority. The reigning Grand Ayatullah has the largest say in how the money is divided among Shi'ite groups. When al-Sadr's father held the post, he was able to keep his faction well supplied with cash, but his death substantially reduced the cut received by al-Sadr's family. The Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, who now holds...
...denouncing the council, the U.S. and the occupation. That struck a chord among the angry, restless young men of the slum neighborhood renamed Sadr City for al-Sadr's father. So did his Arab origins, which had always set the al-Sadr line apart from the Iranian-born Shi'ite ayatullahs like Sistani. For radicals who want to see religious power in the hands of an ethnic Arab, al-Sadr has the right pedigree. Soon he was recruiting Shi'ites into an armed militia, the Mahdi Army, named for the messiah the Shi'ites await. Their stated...
...favorable truce in June that relegated U.S. forces to bases outside the city and did nothing to rid the place of anti-American rebels. U.S. military commanders complained that the political deal simply gave him breathing room to rebuild his battered forces and consolidate himself as the chief Shi'ite resistance leader. There was a growing sense at the Pentagon that such a strategy had only delayed a day of reckoning...