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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Ozeti
was driven past an area, a kind of compound
where his black-c1adarmywas training
for the upcoming revolution to seize
power and take over. Itjust dawned on me
that these people were going to make this
place an authoritarian hell of a new sort,
Thliban style, and would murder a lot of our
allies in the process."
Diamond went to Bremer and gave him
his assessment: the United States urgently
needed to act against Sadr. Bremer responded
that he was waiting for a new plan from
Coalition forces. "1 first wanted to go after
him when he had probably fewer than 200
followers;' Bremer recalled in an interview
with NEWSWEEK last
week. "1 couldn't make it
happen ... the Marines
were resisting doing anything."
But in the meantime,
on March 28, 2004,
Bremer suspended publication
of Sadr's newspaper
after it ran an editorial
praising the 9/11 attacks
on America as a "blessing
fromGod:'
The response was
swift: mass demonstrations,
which led to the
first of two Sadr uprisings
in 2004. ln a final
meeting between Diamond
and Bremer on
April l, Diamond pressed
the point that the United
States needed more
troops in Iraq. It was around 8 p.m., and
Bremer's dinner was sitting on a tray uneaten.
He looked exhausted. '~d he just
didn't want to hear it," says Diamond. "ln
retrospect, 1 think he had gone to the well
on this issue of more troops during 2003,
had gotten nowhere ... and had just resigned
himself to the fact that these troops
just weren't going to come. 1 think the
tragedy is that everyone just gave up:'
When fighting did break out, American
forces hammered the Mahdi Army in Baghdad
and Najaf-first in the spring and then
again, after a broken ceasefire, in the late
summer. Sorne of the worst fighting came in
August, as Sadr's militiamen made their
stand around the Imam Ali Shrine in Naja£
They turned the area into a no-go zone,
sniping at any sign of movement. U.S.forces
retaliated by laying waste to large swaths of
central Naja£ ln the end, Ayatollah Sistani
brought his influence to bear on the renegade
cleric and encouraged a ceasefire.
Attempts to enforce the arrest warrant
against Sadr and severa!aides were dropped,
and Sadr's forces disarmed in Najaf or headed
out of town. They were badly bloodied,
and sorne militants were shellshocked. Others
bragged about how they had fought back
tanks with AK-47s, or disabled Humvees
with a single grenade. Scores of militiamen
were dead, but Sadr's prestige was, if anything,
enhanced: he had fought the mighty
United States to a stalemate.
GETTING SADR
INSIDE THE TENT
SADR NEEDED A NEW STRATEGY, HOWever.
He wasn't strong enough to defeat the
occupier head-on, nor could he eliminate
his Iraqi rivals. So he took up what he calls
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE
Prime Minister Maliki (Ieft) has torced the
U.S. military to remove roadblocks trom Sadr
City's perimeter and to release detainees who
were jailed in sweeps against death squads
"political resistance"-working from within
the system. Chalabi played an important
role here. Washington's favorite lraqi had
found that he had little popularity in his
homeland, so he was seeking alliances. Chalabi
also felt, as did many other lraqis and
Americans, that it was better to bring Sadr
inside the process than to have him trying to
destroy it. "Sadr is respected because of his
lineage and because he speaks for the disenfranchised,
the scared and the angry:' says a
Chalabi aide, who did not want to be named
because of the sensitivity of the subject. "ln
that sort of situation, it makes absolute
sense to try to get him inside the system:'
Sadr made the most of the opening.
Politicians in rus Sadr bloc won 23 of 275
seats in the January 2005 elections and, after
fresh voting nearly a year later, now hold 30
seats. ln both cases, because of divisions between
other large Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni
parties, Sadr was able to play kingmaker.
1\\'0 prime ministers since 2005- Ibrahim
Jaafari and the current Iraqi leader, Nuri al-
Maliki-have depended on his swing votes
for their majority. But Sadr himself stayed
out of government, and kept his distance.
That way he could pursue a dual strategyrebuilding
his militia even as he capitalized
on his control of key ministries, like Health
and 1hmsportation, to provide services to
the poor and jobs ta his followers.
The Sunni insurgents were pursuing a
new strategy, too. ln early 2004, U.S. forces
had intercepted a worried
letter from the Qaeda
leader in Iraq, Abu
Mussab al-Zarqawi, to
Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi
fretted thathis fight
against American forces
was going poorly. But he
had a plan: "If we succeed
in dragging [the
Shiites] into the arena of
sectarian war, it will become
possible to awaken
the inattentive Sunnis as
they feel imminent danger:'
he wrote.
Throughout 2005,
Sunni insurgents
launched increasingly
vicious attacks on Shiite
civilians and holy places.
Sistani regularly called
on his followers to exercise restraint, which
they did with remarkable forbearance. But
Sadr, who had long positioned himself as
an Iraqi nationalist-and who had cooperated
with Sunni fighters in the early stages
of the insurgency-now publicly called for
Sunnis to disavow Zarqawi. New battle
lines were being drawn.
The tuming point came on Feb. 22,
2006, when assailants bombed the goldendomed
Askariya Shrine in Samarra. This
was the burial place of the lOth and nth
imams, and one of the holiest sites of the
Shia faith. After the Samarra bombing,
many Shiites felt compelled to lash back.
Caught in a vicious street fight against Sunnis,
they decided that they'd rather have a
dirty brawler in their corner (like Sadr) than
a gray-bearded holy man (like Sistani). "We
have courage, large amounts of ammunition,
good leaders, and it is a religious duty:'
saysAli Mijbil, a 26-year-old mechanic who
serves in the Mahdi Army. "So why don't we
fight them? We've been kept under Sunni
~~rn)2Click on our map of casualties in Irallat
xtra.Newsweek.com
W
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