Shiite piety mobilizes in Iraq against Iran
Much has been said in recent years about the "Shiite crescent" in which the Islamic Republic of Iran would like to rely on Shiite communities everywhere to fuel its expansion in the Middle East.
According to this kind of identity-based geopolitics, since every Shiite Arab is Shiite, they should be a more or less active representative of Tehran in their region. This logic forgets that from the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani – the most respected of the Shiite authorities – consistently challenges the very principle of Iranian theocracy. It also neglects the fact that the Shiite population, which is the majority in Iraq, provided the bulk of the battalions that held the front against Iran in the 1980-1988 war. It took the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 for this centuries-old border between the Arab and Persian worlds to collapse.
The Mahdi army
Trapped in its sectarian vision of the region, the Bush administration wanted above all to have Shiite partners involved in Iraq's reorganization, once Sunni Saddam Hussein's dictatorship had been overthrown. Pro-Iranian militants returning from exile in Iran or Syria formed the backbone of this "new Iraq," which was led by Nouri Al-Maliki, one of the drafters of the 2005 Constitution.
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Opposing them, the generation that never left Iraq and grew up under the 1991-2003 embargo developed fierce nationalism, under their leader Moqtada Al-Sadr. A simple 30-year-old mullah at the time of the American invasion, he derived his prestige from the "martyrdoms" inflicted by the Baathist regime on his father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Al-Sadr, who was assassinated in 1999, and on his cousin, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Al-Sadr, who was hanged in 1980. Baghdad's most populous Shiite district, which was called "Saddam City" during the dictatorship, was renamed "Sadr City" in 2003, as a sign of its inhabitants' allegiance to Sayyed (descendant of the Prophet Mohammed) Moqtada Al-Sadr.
The young Shiite leader organized his followers into a "Mahdi army," and claimed to be Shiism's 12th and final Imam, who has been hidden from human eyes for more than 1,000 years and whose return is supposed to mark the end of time. The symbolic challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran is coupled with a military challenge from the American occupation, which the Mahdi army fought against in 2004, even within the heart of the holy city of Najaf. Mr. Sadr was even under siege himself for three weeks in the mausoleum of Ali, Shiism's first imam, and he turned the evacuation of this holy place into a political victory. In 2007, Sadr's supporters chose the anniversary of the Mahdi to strike out at their Shiite rivals in Iraq's other holy city, Kerbala, which is the location of the mausoleum of Hussein, Ali's son, martyred in 680. (Ashura, which commemorates Hussein's killing, is the holiest holiday of the Shiite calendar.)
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