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Bombing complicates battle for control of Iraq

"We don't fear these [US and British] forces. This nation wants to preserve its independence and the coalition forces must leave this country." Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim PHOTO: EPA

Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim had just delivered a sermon calling for Iraqi unity, and Friday prayers were under way at Iraq's holiest Shiite shrine when a car bomb exploded.

Al-Hakim, 64, was killed just months after the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein enabled him to return to his native country after more than two decades in exile in Iran.

For some, he represented hope for the establishment of Islamic rule in Iraq and power for Iraq's majority Shiites, long persecuted under Saddam. For others, he belonged to a generation on its way out and an influential family that had grown too powerful.

His death at the gold-domed Imam Ali mosque in the holy city of Najaf further complicates the race for control in post-Saddam Iraq, riven by religious turmoil and wide discontent with the US-led occupation.

Before the US-led invasion, al-Hakim formed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent anti-Saddam group that long advocated Islamic rule for Iraq.

Many compared his homecoming to that of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who spent 14 years in exile in Iraq before returning to lead his country's 1979 Islamic revolution and its clerical regime until his death in 1989.

In the days after the US-led war, al-Hakim's Supreme Council quickly established itself as the largest and best-organized Shiite movement in Shiite-majority Iraq.

The group set off alarm bells in Washington because of its strong links to Iran.

Al-Hakim also denounced the US-led occupation forces. He demanded they withdraw and allow the country's people to establish their own government -- one Islamic in nature.

"We don't fear these [US and British] forces. This nation wants to preserve its independence and the coalition forces must leave this country," al-Hakim said on May 12.

Yet at the same time, he moderated his Islamic fundamentalism, deciding instead to dedicate his life to Muslim spiritual questions. He handed all political ambitions and policies to his brother Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, now a member of the US-picked interim Governing Council. And while he protested the US military occupation, he did not support violent resistance against it.

The al-Hakims are one of the most influential families in the Shiite community in Iraq. Najaf -- al-Hakim's birthplace -- is regarded by the world's 120 million Shiite Muslims as the third holiest in the world after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population, were long oppressed under Saddam's minority Sunni Muslim regime. Regularly during his rule, Saddam banned Shiites from Friday prayers at the shrine.

The ayatollah's return was seen by many as a forerunner to a Shiite political revival in Iraq. Yet as the Americans launched their assault on Saddam's forces, Shiite leaders were also being targeted in Iraq.

Younger Shiites, many from Baghdad's Sadr City slum, have conducted an ongoing power struggle with the more traditional Shiite Muslims in the city and region, conducting a political battle to grab control from the al-Hakim family.

In April, two prominent Shiite clerics were assassinated in Najaf -- killings widely perceived as part of an internal dispute among rival Shiite factions. Last week, a relative of the ayatollah's and one of Iraq's most prominent Shiite clerics, Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, was injured when a gas cylinder placed alongside the wall of his Najaf home exploded. Three guards were killed and 10 family members injured in the Aug. 24 bombing, which happened just after noon prayers.

Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim is one of three top Shiite leaders threatened with death by a rival Shiite cleric shortly after Saddam was toppled April 9. Also, a day after Saddam's ouster, a mob in Najaf hacked to death a Shiite cleric who had just returned from exile.

Abdul Majid al-Khoei was killed when a meeting called to reconcile rival Shiite groups erupted into a melee -- also at the Imam Ali mosque, a place of Shiite pilgrimage for centuries.
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