Al-Sadr-In-The-Box
Stratfor, noodling out al-Sadr’s disappearing act, suggests he’s still in Iraq and that a complex game of chicken is underway:
Al-Sadr has lain low, likely somewhere in the holy city of An Najaf, since remarking in January that he feared for his personal safety in the wake of U.S.-Iraqi plans to secure Baghdad and crack down on militias. Since then, he has seen the arrest and kidnappings of Iranian diplomatic officials in Iraq, which surely made him even less willing to risk travel or public appearances.
The Sadrite bloc controls the largest number of parliamentary seats in the ruling Shiite coalition — the United Iraqi Alliance — and has several ministers in the Cabinet. Al-Sadr is not about to abandon his movement and flee, especially as his Mehdi Army prepares to face a major government offensive. And if he did, he certainly would not go to Iran.
Contrary to popular perception, Iraq’s Sadrite bloc is the Shiite group that is least friendly toward Iran. Al-Sadr cannot completely trust the Iranians, who have strong ties to his main rival, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim — the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Iraq’s most pro-Iranian Shiite party. Iran could use al-Sadr and his militia as leverage in its negotiations with the United States over Iraq; when the need arises, Iran might pull the plug on the Shiite leader as a gesture of good will toward the United States.
… al-Sadr reportedly is on the U.S. military’s “no-touch list,” meaning U.S. forces will not detain him out of fear that his arrest could inflame his supporters and cause them to escalate the overall level of violence in the country.
U.S. statements regarding the Shiite leader’s alleged flight to Iran likely are part of psyops designed to weaken him by convincing those within his political movement and its armed wing that he has abandoned them … By playing up the idea that al-Sadr has fled to Tehran, the United States can sow doubts among members of the Mehdi Army before U.S. and Iraqi forces pounce. And confusion about al-Sadr’s whereabouts will prove especially damaging to the Sadrite bloc, given its heavy focus on its leader and his family.
So, is he going to pop up?
To clarify some of the above, al-Sadr’s murderous militia enjoys Iranian support, but that doesn’t place Iran above selling him out. Al-Sadr has been Iran’s bad cop, al-Hakim’s Badr Brigades, which are well behaved by comparison to the Mahdi Army, the good cop, though al-Hakim has yet to answer for his own highly questionable involvement with Iran, leading up to the recent arrest of Iranian agents in his compound.
Regarding the notion that al-Sadr is on a “no-touch” list, this is an extremely bad idea. The meltaway of the Mahdi Army demonstrates the need to provoke al-Sadr’s followers in order to get them back out where they can be killed, detained and otherwise eliminated as a destabilizing force. But maybe the US and Iraqi forces have some other thoughts on how they are going to accomplish that.
In the long run, there will need to be an accommodation between whatever governments sit in Baghdad and Teheran, as civil neighbors. We are nowhere near that point. What is needed now is not a deal with Iran, whose heavy-handed, terrorism-supporting regime cannot be trusted, but a smackdown of Iran’s proxies in Iraq, to include heat on al-Hakim. The conversation with Iran at this point needs to be show and tell, not chat.
Meanwhile, here’s the latest news report on al-Sadr’s whereabouts. Conflicting claims from Iraqi government officials.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:52 am Comments (4) on Thursday, February 15, 2007
4 Responses to “Al-Sadr-In-The-Box”
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February 15th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Mookie: Here, there, and everywhere
Iraq Government Confirms Sadr In Iran Ed Morrissey The controversy over the whereabouts of Moqtada al-Sadr has ended. An advisor to Nouri al-Maliki confirmed on the record that Sadr is in Iran, as the US reported earlier: An adviser to
February 15th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
One would hope that we’ve learned from our most grievous mistakes made in the past. We face this problem now because we backed off this murderer the first go-round. And the second go-round.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
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February 15th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
“Contrary to popular perception, Iraq’s Sadrite bloc is the Shiite group that is least friendly toward Iran. Al-Sadr cannot completely trust the Iranians, who have strong ties to his main rival, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim”
Uhh. Sadr’s dad was the dude who raised Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah, who is definitely an Iranian stooge. I say Mookie is an Iranian stooge. I am not saying that the Iranians do not have other stooges. They undoubtedly employ lots of them. I am not saying that they wouldn’t trade Mookie for a bag of baseballs and two boxes of frozen catfish. They would trade their firstborn if it served their purposes. But Mookie is theirs.