Mahdi Army Update
| Mon Nov. 10, 2008 9:30 AM PST
MAHDI ARMY UPDATE....Ned Parker of the LA Times reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has fallen on hard times:
In a telling measure of the militia's power, the U.S. military credits Sadr's decision more than a year ago to call a cease-fire as one of the chief reasons for the sharp drop in violence in Iraq.
But Sadr's fortunes have also plummeted, and his followers now contemplate a world where they are on the run and their Shiite rivals have the upper hand.
....Sadr's troubles are rooted in the fighting between his militia and Iraqi security forces that erupted in March after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki ordered the army to clear the militia's strongholds in the southern city of Basra. The clashes there ended only when Sadr commanded his militia to stand down, and then did the same in Sadr City six weeks later.
....With his armed wing formally frozen, Sadr looked to repair his movement's image. He announced in June that his fighters should form a new social and religious education organization, named Mumahidoon, which aims to teach Iraqis about Islam.
...."To avoid having his organization continually targeted, he had to do something with them, so he followed the Islamic Brotherhood and Hezbollah model," a U.S. military intelligence officer said, referring to other Islamist movements that provide charitable services and enjoy popularity in the Arab world.
At the time, I was skeptical that the Basra operation was a big win for Maliki, but obviously I was pretty spectacularly wrong about that. It's still not clear to me exactly what happened in Basra — did Sadr get beaten? did he sincerely decide that the violence had gotten out of hand? did he take direction from Iran? — but there's not much question that the eventual result was an enormous drop in influence for Sadr and a victory for Maliki and his Badr Organization allies.
In any case, read the whole thing if you're interested in the current lay of the land in Sadr City. It's certainly possible that Sadr could someday Hezbollah-ize his operation and end up more influential than ever, but in the meantime the cease-fire looks like a pretty permanent decision.
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Comments
Sadr's strength lay in the perceived failure of the government to protect Iraqis and their perceived impotence with relation to US forces.
Declining overall violence, increasing government control, weakness of the Bush administration, and now an impending US phased withdrawal all contribute to Sadr's weakness. They were strongest when the Sunnis were killing Shiites in the hundreds.
I'm not sure how much the Basra attacks contributed -- other than pointing out the (potential if not actual) reach of the central government and the role of Sadr in intra-Shiite violence (as opposed to anti-Sunni violence, and protection from Sunni terrorists).
The bar for the central government will increase over time. At some point people will not simply be content with not being blown up so a Hezbollah reinvention might work if the government is less successful at the small things.
Hezbollah, the islamic brotherhood, Hamas, Taliban, etc. could be (have been) marginalized by effective central governments which are responsive to security and economic issues of their citizens.
Is this a good thing?
My casual recollection put Sadr and his Mahdi Army in the local nationalist camp, less aligned with the Iranians than the Badr organization. Reportedly Muqtada and his family had endured under Saddam rather than going into (mostly Iranian) exile.
It seemed that their main shortcoming was hostility to American occupation. So do we still want them marginalized if we are withdrawing?
Submitted by Victor Tremblay (not verified) on Mon Nov. 10, 2008 3:27 PM PST.
I agree that we do not have enough information right now to say exactly what is the strength of Sadr now. But there is one thing for sure; it is much harder to build a Hezbollah-like organization in a country that is ruled by fellow Shiites than a country like Lebanon which has been ruled by Christians, Sunni Muslims (who despise Shiites as poor and uneducated in Lebanon) and from time to time Israeli invaders. Hezbollah succeeded by being the only organization that defended Lebanese Shiites, in an environment where they had almost no access to "legitimate" power. Iraq would appears to be different; I have no doubt that Maliki is trying hard to integrate Shiite from Sadr's areas into the government's patronage system, undercutting Sadr's influence. I do not believe that the Hezbollah strategy will be any effective in such an environment; although it might become powerful if Sunni were to take over the government again.
I thought that Coburn wrote about the tactics being used against them forcing them into the IRA model structure, separating the political and military wings totally. My view is that Iran wanted them subdued, as well as us, because they could now negotiate us out of Iraq, why fight us. Eventually Bush would be gone and we would go back to obeying international law, sort of.
