Juan Cole

*Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, the leader of the popular Sadr Movement in Iraqi Shiism, gave an interview today to al-Hayat’s Hazim al-Amin in Najaf. He said that in the religious establishment of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Sayyid Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, Shaykh Bashir al-Najafi, and Shaykh Muhammad al-Fayyad all supported one another and recognized that each […]

*Reporters on the ground in Majar al-Kabir, southern Iraq, have begun to piece together what may have happened there Tuesday when 6 British troops were killed and several more wounded in two distinct attacks. The story as I see it goes this way: Paul Bremer set a deadline of June 16 for Iraqi militiamen to […]

*The ambush of British troops near Amara that killed six of them on Tuesday was probably the work of bandits, according to Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent. The south of Iraq has been plagued by banditry for years. Under Saddam, some of it may have been social banditry, in which Shiite tribesmen […]

*From the BBC: “Text of report by Iraqi Shi’i group’s Iran-based radio station Voice of the Mujahidin on 21 June: “His Eminence Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq SCIRI , said in the Friday prayers sermon in Al-Najaf al-Ashraf city that the United States has proved that […]

*US civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer said Sunday that he may distribute profit dividends from the Iraqi petroleum industry directly to Iraqi citizens, along the model used by Alaska ( – Roula Khalaf, Financial Times). It is really good news that he is thinking along these lines, since one feared that the rightwing Bush […]

*Radical Shiite clerics in East Baghdad tried to get up a big demonstration against the American occupation on Saturday (they began organizing it after Friday prayers on Friday). But they were only able to get about 2000 demonstrators out in front of the US HQ in downtown Baghdad. They tried to organize a similar protest […]

*Richard Perle, member of the Pentagon Advisory Board and unnoficial adviser to the Bush administration, has admitted that the regime of Saddam Hussein posed no direct threat to the US, according to al-Hayat. I was not able to verify the report at Lexis Nexis. Al-Hayat says that Perle, who is speaking in Europe these days, […]

*The attacks on US troops in Iraq continue. On Thursday there were three such incidents. In Samawah, a largely Shiite town with some Sunni presence, a rocket propelled grenade hit a military ambulance and killed a US soldier. In the Shiite holy city of Samarra north of Baghdad, a mortar was fired at a US-run […]

*According to Islam Online, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a religious ruling or fatwa calling upon Iraqis to wage “civil” (i.e. nonviolent) “jihad” on the US occupation, by simply continually asking rather pointedly when the Americans are planning to leave. Sistani’s secretary and spokesman compared this period of psychological preparation for resistance to the […]