Juan Cole

Some two million Shiites live in eastern Baghdad, and several factions are jockeying for influence with them. Press reports of local Shiite clerics in Baghdad organizing neighborhood militias to restore order after the looting of the weekend of April 11-12 quoted them as loyal either to the Najaf establishment (mainly Muqtada al-Sadr) or to al-Da`wa. […]

*Al-Hayat for April 18 has an interview with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. It says that Sistani “affirmed his rejection of any foreign power after the war to which the country had been subjected.” His son Muhammad Rida Sistani conveyed from his father “his rejection of any foreign power that would rule Iraq, emphasizing […]

*I’ve just read several recent new reports on the Shiites of Iraq, and I am struck by how often people mention the authority they grant to the religious establishment in Najaf. Many members of the al-Da`wa party and supporters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq appear to discount democracy in favor of […]

AFP and ash-Sharq al-Awsat are reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (73) in Najaf issued a statement through is son, Muhammad Rida Ali Sistani, calling for Iraq to be government by “the best of its sons” (khirat abna’ihi). “It is for Iraqis to choose who governs; we want them to control the country.” The son […]

Iraqi Shiites in the slums of Baghdad, which were once called al-Thawrah Towship and then Saddam City, have now renamed their neighborhood Sadr City after the martyred Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was assassinated by the Baathists in 1999. There are reports of local Shiite clerics like Ali al-Shawki, arming followers and establishing neighborhood militias […]

The Iraq war has resulted in many human casualties that make any humane person want to weep. I hope the human sacrifice will have been worth it; certainly Saddam’s regime was virtually genocidal and it is a great good thing that it is gone. But the continued urban looting is an indictment of Rumsfeld and […]

*Khu’i appears to have been killed in Najaf by a mob of radical followers of the 22-year-old Muqtada al-Sadr. His father had been a supporter of Khomeini in Iran, and the links to pro-Iran radicalism I speculated about yesterday are being confirmed by al-Jazeera and Reuters. This factionalism in Najaf, and the loss of the […]

The events around the assassination of Shiite leader Abd al-Majid Khu’i in Najaf a couple of days ago remain murky. From what I can tell, though, Khu’i got involved in trying to defend a man named Kalidar, the keeper of Ali’s shrine in Najaf, from an angry crowd who was accusing him of having collaborated […]

*Madinat Saddam, a Shiite area of 2 million in Baghdad, had already tossed out the Iraqi militiamen two days ago, it turns out. These desperately poor slum dwellers had suffered massacres as recently as 1999, when they rose up in protest against Saddam’s assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. I suspect their first order of […]