Word: sistani
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...mosque in Kufa last Friday, the U.S. may be underestimating the rebel leader. In fact, the more the U.S. aims its guns at al-Sadr, the more popular he seems to become. According to a recent poll, he is now second in popularity to the Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the Shi'ites' spiritual leader...
...thinks of as terrorists and is now turning security over to local militias. Politically, we have tossed the ball to Lakhdar Brahimi and the U.N. But even Brahimi doesn't have much stroke. The real governing authority in Iraq appears to be the Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, who dictated the al-Sadr solution last week, and in effect vetoed the interim constitution the U.S. proposed and will, no doubt, have final say over Brahimi's new government. The President pretends that none of this is happening. Most Americans sense the President is just pretending, and they are impatiently waiting...
...commanders on the ground would prefer to see the Baathists and the Sadrists competing at the ballot box than taking pot shots at it. And there's good reason to believe that can be achieved in the case of Sadr, at least, who has long embraced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's demand for elections. The firebrand cleric has perfected the art of campaigning for Shiite popular support by attacking the Americans - the U.S. was late in recognizing that far from isolating him, American military action against Sadr was actually boosting his popularity. Current opinion surveys in Iraq find Sadr ranking...
...officials say their strategy in Najaf and elsewhere has worked to turn powerful Shiites against Sadr. It's certainly true that two of his key rivals, the SCIRI and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have called with increasingly insistence for Sadr's men leave the shrine cities. But they're also calling on the U.S. to do the same, and have shied away from armed confrontations with the Sadrists. The rebel cleric clearly believes he can make the U.S. strategy work to his advantage because military actions in Karbala and Najaf deepens the hostility of ordinary Shiites towards the Coalition, potentially...
...Karbala. Sadr appears to be riding on the U.S. campaign against him as a means to eclipse his rivals in the battle for Shiite support. His tactics appear to involve goading the U.S. into increasingly risky actions around the holy sites, and then publicly lambasting Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for failing to act on his warning to the U.S. against crossing the "red line" of entering the shrine cities...