MUST READ: MOQTADA'S AL-SADR'S NEW ALLIANCE WITH TEHRAN

Moqtada's al-Sadr's New Alliance with Tehran
By Babak Rahimi

For the last three years, Tehran's relationship with the firebrand junior cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has undergone a significant change. During the early rise of the Sadrist phenomenon, the young cleric was viewed by Iranian officials, especially by the major clerics in the government, as the son of a grand ayatollah who had gone wild, a novice student from a prestigious clerical family who makes his decisions without consulting his religious elders and acts without considering the general good of the Shiite community. In April 2004, when al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, confronted U.S. troops after weeks of urban fighting, a number of ayatollahs in Iran, including the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were upset by the fighting, which they believed defiled the city of Najaf, one of the Shiites' holiest places, and also put at risk the unity of the Shiite community under the U.S. occupation. It was finally under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and collaboration of a number of Iranian delegates in Najaf that al-Sadr's Mahdi Army gave up its armed resistance and began to participate in the democratic political process. Iran-Sadr relations, however, have undergone a major transformation since the January 2005 and December 2005 elections, when the followers of al-Sadr were able to win a considerable number of parliamentary seats in the Iraqi National Assembly. Realizing the effectiveness of al-Sadr's well-organized militia and emerging popular base, Tehran then began to establish closer ties with al-Sadr and started to treat him as a major political figure. Such links have included supplying his Mahdi Army with lightweight weaponry and training the militia's commanders in a similar fashion that the Qods Force trained Afghanistan's Ahmad Shah Masoud against the Russians, Muslim Bosnians against the Serbs and Hezbollah against the Israelis in the 1980s and 1990s.

While the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) remains Tehran's main ally in Iraq today, Tehran considers al-Sadr an important partner against foreign threats, especially in case of a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities and, concurrently, a surge of Wahhabi extremism in the region, which would threaten the security of the Shiite community, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For al-Sadr, likewise, Tehran can provide his Mahdi Army with a new heroic prestige much like the prestige that has enabled Hezbollah of Lebanon to become the source of admiration for many Sunni Arabs. Although careful in the way he continues to associate with Iran, since he fears being viewed by some Iraqis (especially Sunni Arabs) as another Iranian puppet like SCIRI, al-Sadr considers Tehran's military support as a sure way of bolstering his base in Baghdad and southern Iraq, and also defending against any potential military threats to his militia by U.S. troops or rival Shiite and Sunni militias.

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Conclusion

The United States should understand the dynamics of Tehran's ties to al-Sadr, especially since the future of this alliance largely depends on how U.S. policy toward Iran will evolve in the months to come. To be sure, as the U.N.'s Security Council, led by the U.S. administration, contemplates tougher actions against Iran's nuclear program, it is likely that Tehran's ties with al-Sadr will grow in a militaristic dimension, and the Mahdi Army could emerge as the Lebanese Hezbollah of Iraq. The new Iraq emerging under the ashes of the Baathist regime could become a new site for proxy wars between Iran and the United States.

Babak Rahimi received a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. Dr. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham and London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace from 2005-2006, where he conducted research on Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Shi'a politics in post-Baathist Iraq. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature, Program for the Study of Religion, University of California, San Diego.


Pertinent Links:

1) Moqtada's al-Sadr's New Alliance with Tehran