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Clerical trouble in the
south
By Charles Recknagel
PRAGUE - It is still unclear who attacked the
home of Ayatollah Muhammad Sa'id al-Hakim at the
weekend, apparently in an effort to kill the 67-year-old
religious leader.
News agencies quote a
spokesman for the cleric, Abdul Hussein al-Kadi, as
saying that four men in a car dropped a canister of
cooking gas near the wall of the house beside the room
where the grand ayatollah and his son were resting.
The spokesman said that bodyguards noticed a
flame coming from the top of the canister before it
exploded, killing two of the guards and another
household employee. The ayatollah was also wounded with
light cuts to the neck.
But while no one knows
who was behind the attack, suspicion in Najaf
immediately fell on political rivals of the al-Hakim
family. And those enemies - thanks to the family's
prominence - are numerous.
The ayatollah is the
head of one of Iraq's most powerful clerical families.
The family includes his nephew Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir
al-Hakim, who leads the best-organized Iraqi Shi'ite
group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI).
The group waged a long guerrilla
campaign against deposed leader Saddam Hussein from
exile in Iran until the US overthrew the Iraqi regime in
April. In recent months, the SCIRI has modified its
traditional calls for an Islamic system in Iraq and now
says that it is ready to work toward that goal within a
democratic framework. A representative of the SCIRI is
one of the 25 members of the US-appointed Governing
Council in Baghdad.
Within hours of the attack,
a top SCIRI official said that Saddam loyalists had
attempted to kill the religious leader, who has no
formal relationship with the SCIRI itself. Mohsen
al-Hakim told France's AFP news agency that "the primary
suspects are former members of the Ba'ath regime ...
that want to spark a war between Shi'ites and Sunnis."
But Saddam loyalists are perhaps just the most
obvious enemy to single out. Many observers say that it
is equally possible that Hakim was attacked by
supporters of another Iraqi Shi'ite religious family who
oppose working with the US-led occupation.
That
is the al-Sadr family, until recently headed by Grand
Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was assassinated
along with two of his sons by presumed agents of Saddam
in Najaf in 1999. The loyalty of many of his supporters
has now passed to another son, Muqtada, a mid-level
cleric about 30 years of age.
Mohamed-Ali
Haidari, a correspondent with RFE/RL's Radio Free Iraq,
says that relatives of this weekend's bombing victims
accused al-Sadr supporters of staging the attack. "Some
of the people who were in the funeral of those three who
were killed yesterday accused Muqtada al-Sadr followers
and they called on the religious leaders to establish a
Shi'ite militia in Najaf to prevent another attack,"
Haidari said.
Al-Sadr's group, which calls
itself "The Active Religious Seminary", has denied it
has anything to do with the attempt on the elder
al-Hakim, and said that Saddam loyalists are to blame.
But al-Sadr's group has previously drawn charges of
involvement in attacks and intimidation in Najaf that
have highlighted political differences among Shi'ite
political organizations.
The most notable of
those attacks was a mob killing of a pro-US cleric, Abd
al-Majid al-Khoi, shortly after his return from exile in
London in early April. Al-Khoi was himself the son of
another extremely powerful former grand ayatollah,
Abolqassem al-Khoi.
Al-Khoi was murdered as he
emerged from the city's Imam Ali Mosque in a gesture of
reconciliation with the mosque's custodian, who was
popularly considered to have collaborated with Saddam's
regime. The custodian was killed along with al-Khoi and
it is unclear whether al-Khoi was an assassination
target or was struck down because he tried to defend the
other man.
Immediately after al-Khoi's murder,
supporters of al-Sadr surrounded the house of another
grand ayatollah in Najaf, Ali Sistani, in what was taken
to be a gesture of intimidation. Sistani - who has said
that Shi'ite leaders should limit themselves to
religious questions and stay out of politics - went into
hiding and only re-emerged after tribesmen loyal to him
raced to Najaf.
Correspondent Haidari says that
after the attack on al-Khoi and the siege at Sistani's
house, religious leaders in Najaf sought to smooth
relations between all parties to prevent further unrest:
"The Shi'ite leaders in Najaf tried to calm down the
situation and tried to fix the relations between the
different parties in order not to go further with the
disagreements and differences between the al-Sadr
followers and those of al-Hakim and Sistani," Haidari
said.
He continued, "They tried to bring them
together and al-Sadr condemned the attack on Abd Majid
al-Khoi and said that it is ridiculous to say that our
followers are the people who did it."
The two
other living grand ayatollahs, who along with al-Hakim
and Sistani comprise the four most powerful clerics in
Iraq, are Muhammad Ishaq Fayadh and Bashir Hussein
al-Najafi. Both rarely speak on political issues. All
four are based in the Shi'ite seminary - the
hawza - in Najaf, which is the highest religious
authority of Iraq's majority Shi'ite population. Their
followers regard them as sources for religious emulation
and their written opinions can carry the force of law.
With suspicion in the bomb attack on al-Hakim
now divided between Saddam loyalists and the rival
Shi'ite group of al-Sadr, the incident is only likely to
deepen the uncertainty and distrust that currently make
Washington's task of creating a stable, post-Saddam Iraq
so difficult.
The attacks show that while most
of the world's attention is on Baghdad in the wake of
the massive bombing of the UN headquarters last week,
Iraq's political wars are neither confined to the
capital nor to targeting foreigners and coalition
troops. They also aim at settling differences between
domestic groups vying for power, even as the coalition
seeks to begin moving the country toward future national
elections.
US civil administrator for Iraq L
Paul Bremer said last week that it will be six to eight
months before a constitution can be adopted and general
elections held.
Copyright (c) 2002, RFE/RL
Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave
NW, Washington DC 20036
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