Word: sistani
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...troops at Karbala, Kufa and Baghdad. The U.S. objective may be to weaken the Mehdi militia and raise the pressure on Moqtada, but the firebrand cleric appears to be using that pressure to his own ends - particularly to challenge his more moderate rivals, chief among them Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sadr has long rejected what he sees as Sistani's quiescence toward the occupation, and he cleverly judged that Sistani's silence in recent days despite the Abu Ghraib scandal and U.S. military action that damaged a mosque in the shrine city of Karbala may be damaging Sistani's standing...
...little widespread support among mainstream Shi'ites. But al-Sadr's rise has alarmed senior Shi'ite clerics, who view him as an upstart demagogue. Al-Sadr's troops have regularly clashed with the more powerful Shi'ite militia known as the Badr Brigade. Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the most prominent Shi'ite leader in Iraq, has ordered all Shi'ite factions to avoid further confrontation with al-Sadr's men, fearing it would lead to fratricidal Shi'ite violence, but, Iraqi intelligence sources say, Thulfiqar could be a splinter faction of the Badr Brigade working independently. Those sources...
...Sadr take his militia and his confrontation with the Americans out of town. But as much as they loathe Moqtada as an upstart troublemaker, even the most moderate among them are fiercely opposed to any U.S. military operation against him in the Shiite holy city. Everyone from Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the moderate elder of the Iraqi clerics on whose consent the entire transition process rests, to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN diplomat to whom the Bush administration is looking to devise a political formula that will succeed where Washington's have failed, have warned the U.S. against sending troops into...
...loathed by the clerical establishment, his path of confrontation has struck a chord among significant sections of the Shiite urban poor. Even among his detractors in the clergy, it's not clear that hostility towards Moqtada is greater than antipathy towards the Coalition. The moderate leadership around Sistani wants Moqtada handled with kid gloves - and more importantly, it wants its own grievances with the U.S.-authored interim constitution to be resolved...
...enact new laws or reverse those proclaimed by the occupation authority. That, say U.S. officials, is because the primary purpose of a new government is simply to organize elections scheduled for next January. But in the absence of an electoral law, and in light of the fierce opposition by Sistani to the minority veto provisions of the interim constitution that he says has no legitimacy, the June 30 handover may simply complicate the lines of political conflict. Control over all the country's security forces will be in the hands of General John Abizaid, while the purse strings...