The Internal Shiite War

Especially over the past three years, a great deal of ISCI's lethality has been directed toward Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc and his powerful militia, the Mahdi Army, or Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM). From the suburbs of Baghdad, to Najaf and Karbala, to Diwaniya, Amarah and Basra, ISCI has been engaged in a bloody confrontation with the JAM, its chief rival among Iraq's Shiite population. And in the Badr versus Sadr fight, the United States has unequivocally supported ISCI. "The real struggle in the long term is between SCIRI and the Sadrists," says Joost Hiltermann of the ICG. "And the Americans have in fact chosen the SCIRI side in this." In so doing, they've chosen to side with a pro-Iran party against a movement that is, despite some ties to Iran, far more independent-minded than ISCI. Paradoxically, that's pushed Sadr closer to Iran.

The Sadr-Badr rivalry is intensified by the fact that both Sadr and Hakim are scions of legendary Iraqi clerical families. When the Hakims fled Iraq, taking up residence in Iran during the era of Saddam, the Sadrs stayed in Iraq. Because it was sponsored by Tehran, Hakim's ISCI is viewed suspiciously by most Iraqis, while Sadr's less organized movement--built mosque by mosque, underground, before, during and after the US invasion--has much deeper roots in Iraq. Their constituencies are different, too, breaking down clearly along class lines. Hakim represents the urban elite and Shiite Iraq's business and commercial class, and his party's leadership has much in common with the merchants, traders and bazaaris who are the backbone of the ruling elite in Iran. Sadr, on the other hand, has the undying loyalty of Iraq's Shiite underclass and urban poor, and he has gained the support of many former Shiite Baathists and Arab nationalists who felt they had nowhere else to go after the overthrow of Saddam.

Although the US tactical alliance with ISCI has been in place since 2003, the joint US-ISCI campaign against Sadr escalated dramatically only last year, after President Bush announced the US troop surge. In that January 2007 speech, Bush explicitly warned Iran that it was the target. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," he said. "We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran.... And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq." But when the United States started talking about "Iranian-backed" forces in Iraq, it didn't mean ISCI; it meant Sadr and the JAM, especially so-called JAM Special Groups, or what the US military started calling "bad JAM." According to the Pentagon, the JAM, or elements of it, were attacking US forces in Iraq with Iranian-made armor-piercing explosives and training JAM militiamen to use precisely targeted mortars and rockets to attack the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad.

Sadr, a wily nationalist, tried to hold both the United States and Iran at arm's length in the first years of the occupation, but the past eighteen months of unrelenting American-ISCI military pressure has left him little choice other than to seek help from Iran. Sensing that the surge would lead to an onslaught against his forces, last February Sadr ordered the JAM to stand down, and he himself went into hiding. According to David Satterfield, the State Department's senior adviser on Iraq, Sadr has spent most of the past fifteen months in Iran. A February 2008 ICG report described a significant shift in Sadr's rhetoric on Iran, which had been stridently anti-Iranian until recently. "Muqtada al-Sadr used to stick to a nationalist line. Now, one could describe his rhetoric as almost pro-Iranian," a Sadrist leader told the ICG. "Even the Mahdi Army has shifted its tone. Last year's anti-Iranian discourse has given way to something quite different."

Across the south, despite Sadr's intent to lie low, a Badr-Sadr battle raged. The Badr forces, often in the form of Iraqi army and police units, mercilessly suppressed the JAM. American and Badr forces fought side by side against Sadr's less well-armed ragtag militias. Dozens of JAM cells were broken up and hundreds of people were killed or arrested. In Baghdad and provincial capitals like Diwaniya--where a series of large-scale raids on the JAM occurred--US forces as often as not found themselves being used by ISCI to hammer Sadr. "When Sadrists are arrested, they claim that pro-ISCI people are behind arrests," says Reidar Visser of the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, who has written extensively on the political struggles in Iraq's south.

"The Badrists are basically using the United States as a tool to weaken the Sadrists," says Peter Harling of the ICG. "We hear reports across the board of Badrists in neighborhoods denouncing whoever is related to the Sadrist movement to the United States. A number of people, including people who are hostile to the Sadrist movement, say that the Badrists are out in the field, doing the intelligence work and pointing the United States in what they say is the right direction--that is, against Sadrist elements. And the United States is not very discriminating in sorting out its enemies."

"The United States is being played," agrees Kenneth Katzman, Middle East specialist for the Congressional Research Service. "The US military is being played by the Hakims in this internecine struggle."

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