Juan Cole

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 […]

*The British forces in Basra have announced that the battle for that city has just about ended. They have taken most of the important government buildings and have 4000 troops with 200 tanks inside the city. Some Fedayee Saddam guerrillas still lurk in the twisting alleyways, but the populace has apparently lost all fear of […]

*Humanitarian disaster may loom in Basra if something isn’t done quickly. The city has fallen to British forces and some of the population has turned on Baath enforcers, killing them. But despite their evident joy at being liberated, the people of the city are thirsty. They do not have access to clean water, and will […]

*For anyone who hasn’t been near news this morning, the US military has taken several key sites in downtown Baghdad in a dramatic show of force. Taking and pacifying a city of 5 million will take some time, but apparently the Iraqi military has collapsed to the point where the US can just walk into […]