Sadr's moves suggest threats weren't empty

BAGHDAD -- When Moqtada al-Sadr unveiled his Army of the Mahdi last summer, US officials scoffed at his boast that he commanded 10,000 Islamic fighters awaiting his orders across Iraq.

Sadr -- a junior cleric who inherited a mantle of leadership from his father and uncle, two widely-revered ayatollahs slain by Saddam Hussein -- railed with weekly vitriol against the US occupation forces from his mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. He accused American troops of doing Israel's bidding in Iraq, and hinted repeatedly that if pushed, he would call for an uprising.

Now the United States has called Sadr's bluff and challenged him directly, first by closing his newspaper and then by announcing a warrant to arrest him in the murder of a rival cleric a year ago.

Sadr's swift, choreographed, nationwide response suggests many of his threats were not empty.

Beginning on March 28, Sadr's followers took to the streets to protest the occupation authority's decision to close his newspaper, the Hawza, for inciting violence.

"Martyrdom or victory!" and "Down with Israel!" chanted Sadr's supporters in daily marches that swelled to tens of thousands of participants and for several days running have forced occupation officials to seal off the "Green Zone" in central Baghdad.

The fervor of the Army of the Mahdi echoes Sadr's radical message. He tells his followers that the "illegal American occupation" aims to place Iraq under Israel's control. He has galvanized poor, urban, disenfranchised Shi'ite men; most of the Mahdi fighters chanting in the marches and fighting in the streets in recent days have been males in their teens.

Sadr has stepped into the authority vacuum left by Hussein's ouster with a vengeance, establishing offices in nearly every Shi'ite neighborhood.

Unlike the nascent political parties in Iraq, he recognizes no other authority and imposes stern discipline. In recent months his followers in the Army of the Mahdi have boldly proclaimed their allegiance, wearing photos of Sadr and his father pinned to their chests -- or watches emblazoned with their faces, in the style of the timepieces of the Hussein regime.

As a group of young men surged toward a reporter yesterday after clashes in the Shuala neighborhood to tell of their devotion to Sadr, their armed leader silenced them; only clerics were allowed to speak for the group. The recruits stared down the end of their AK-47s at American soldiers 100 yards down the street.

A 30-year-old who delivers his sermons in a monotone, Sadr has electrified the following he inherited from his slain father, whose name now adorns neighborhoods and hospitals throughout Iraq.

In September, in a rare interview with a small group of Western journalists, Sadr said the Army of the Mahdi would thrive and would rise up against the Americans when the people's anger outgrew their patience. "I do not care what the Americans say, and I never did," Sadr said. "I listen only to the Iraqi people."

At the time, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Woodbridge, the US Marines commander in Najaf who monitored the cleric's Friday speeches and whose troops regularly skirmished with Mahdi fighters, mocked Sadr as "a poser, a little boy playing cleric."

Establishment Shi'ite clerics also dismissed Sadr as a flashy, young bully, eager to attract attention but without enough religious training to lead. But the recent show of force suggests that Sadr's influence has grown, even while rival clerics, and US officials, were asserting that the audience for Sadr's fiery speeches had waned.

Asad Turki Swari, a representative of Sadr's central office, yesterday spoke before 50 men in Shuala, most of them armed.

"They are willing to sacrifice their lives, because they see that he is willing to sacrifice his life like his father," Swari said.

In the Shuala and Sadr City sections of Baghdad, hundreds of Mahdi fighters defiantly brandished their machine guns, often within sight of the US soldiers with whom they had clashed hours earlier and despite a ban on posessing such weapons.

Major General Martin Dempsey, commander of US forces in Baghdad, called the Mahdi fighters "a mob with a lot of ammunition."

But he conceded that the men who killed eight US soldiers in Sadr city Sunday night were very well organized. They managed to lure an American patrol into an ambush, then ambushed the two sets of troops that came to the patrol's aid.

"It was a very calculated action," he said.

Sadr is believed to pay his fighters $300 a month, more than the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps earn, a senior military official said.