Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose fiery anti-US message mobilized millions of poor Shiites after the 2003 US invasion, has faded from the public eye since he embraced religious studies in Iran two years ago.
Now he may be seeking a new, less militant image designed to win him wider support across Iraq’s sectarian spectrum.
Yet it will be difficult for Sadr, like other politicians in a country only just emerging from years of sectarian bloodshed, to reinvent himself and build the broad ethno-sectarian support that might restore him to political prominence.
“After disappearing for two years, it seems Sadr wants a new beginning,” said Saad al-Hadithi, an analyst in Baghdad.
“He may try to replace the military face of his movement, rooted in the Mehdi Army, with a new political one,” he said.
The electoral ambitions of the enigmatic Sadr, rarely seen in public since he began his bid to climb the Shiite clerical hierarchy, attracted renewed scrutiny after he surfaced in Turkey this month to meet Turkish leaders and his supporters.
The Sadr movement’s Mehdi Army militia, which was blamed for much of the sectarian killing that piled bodies up on Baghdad streets in 2006 and 2007, has mostly retreated into the shadows.
Sadr’s political base, impoverished Shiites in Baghdad and southern Iraq, remains potent, but its loyalty is in question.
Analysts see the Sadr organization, which includes a political wing, an armed wing and an increasingly prominent social service organization, as splintered and undisciplined.
Sadr may have even more trouble corralling support ahead of a national election in January since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki managed to get Washington to agree to a timetable for withdrawing US troops, stealing Sadr’s anti-US thunder.
His path will have broad implications for Iraq, where reconciliation is elusive and recent bombings raise questions about whether the country might tip back into all-out war.
Sadr’s name alone brings him considerable support. In Sadr City, a rundown swathe of eastern Baghdad, the cleric’s bearded, boyish face gazes out intensely from ubiquitous posters.
The scion of an influential Shiite clerical family targeted by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the youthful Sadr, now around 35, emerged as a powerful figure after Hussein’s ouster in 2003.
He joined Maliki’s Shiite-led government in 2006, but withdrew his ministers in 2007. His movement did not formally run in January’s provincial elections, but supporters made a respectable showing nonetheless in Baghdad and southern Iraq.
Now, politicians close to Sadr say they are seeking to reinvent their movement and cast themselves, as Maliki himself is trying to do, as a less Shiite sectarian force.
Salah al-Ubaidi, Sadr’s chief spokesman in Iraq, said the movement has held meetings with minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds and with members of a state-backed Sunni militia movement.
“The door is open. We are not closing it to anyone,” he said.
Salim al-Jubouri, spokesman for the Sunni Arab Accordance Front, spoke encouragingly of a possible alliance.
But can an avowedly religious movement, whose militia won a fearsome name for slaughtering Sunnis, transcend its past?
“In the last election, we started to see people lean towards civil, rather than religious, political discourse,” said Hazim al-Nuami, a political analyst in Baghdad.
Rather than a shift in ideology, analysts see a change in strategy in a war-battered nation where many people are fed up with the sectarian parties that have dominated since 2003.
If January’s provincial elections are any guide, politicians in Iraq may tailor their message, sincerely or not, to voters’ bread-and-butter needs — security, jobs and basic services.
Sadr may also be on his way to becoming a mujtahid, an Islamic scholar with the authority to issue religious decrees.
If he does obtain enhanced clerical credentials, he may seek to influence politics indirectly, like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, or he might take a more active role, like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a major Shiite religious party.
“Our politics is religion and our religion is politics. We cannot leave politics and withdraw to mosques,” said Aqeel Abid Hussein, head of the Sadrist bloc in parliament.
The Mehdi Army, which led two revolts against US troops in 2004 but was seen as fractured from the start, was weakened when Maliki launched major US-backed crackdowns last year.
Since then, Sadr has ordered most of the militiamen to lay down their arms and embrace a cultural, civil society role.
Major-General David Perkins, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, said many Mehdi Army leaders had fled to Iran. The militia may be less active, but US officials warn of Iranian backing for die-hard elite fighters with sophisticated weapons.
“With the loss of their leadership, they are splintered. They have differing viewpoints on some of the ways ahead,” Perkins said.
Nevertheless, Salman al-Feraiji, who heads Sadr’s offices in Sadr City, vowed the fight against US troops would go on until the last US soldier had left Iraq.
“We haven’t abandoned weapons or armed struggle against the occupiers,” he said.
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