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Al Sadr says he is being targeted and has moved his family to safe place

Iraq's radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr said in an interview published yesterday in an Italian newspaper that his Mehdi Army militia would not resist the Iraqi prime minister's planned security crackdown during the sacred Islamic month of Moharram.

  • AP
  • Published: 00:00 January 20, 2007
  • Gulf News

  • Image Credit: AP
  • "It is not us they want to destroy, but Islam. We are just an obstacle," says Moqtada Al Sadr, Shiite cleric.

Rome: Iraq's radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr said in an interview published yesterday in an Italian newspaper that his Mehdi Army militia would not resist the Iraqi prime minister's planned security crackdown during the sacred Islamic month of Moharram.

Al Sadr said that 400 of his men had been arrested and that he is also being targeted, prompting him to move his family to a secure location, the Italian daily La Repubblica reported.

Pressure is increasing on Al Sadr's militia ahead of a planned security sweep aimed at stemming the sectarian violence ransacking the Iraqi capital. Yesterday, US and Iraqi forces arrested one of the cleric's top aides in Baghdad, his office said.

"During Moharram, the Quran prohibits us from killing," the cleric told the Italian newspaper, referring to the Islamic lunar month marking the death of Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad [PBUH]. Muharram starts Friday for Sunnis and Saturday for Shiites.

"Let them kill us. For a true believer there is no better moment than this to die: Heaven is ensured," he was quoted as saying.

"After Moharram, we'll see. It is not us they want to destroy, but Islam. We are just an obstacle," said Al Sadr. "For the time being we will not put up resistance." The newspaper did not say how or where it conducted the interview with Al Sadr.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has pledged to crack down on Shiite militias as well as Sunni insurgents in a planned security operation to quell the sectarian violence in Baghdad.

Critics have charged that two previous crackdowns failed because the prime minister, who gets political backing from Al Sadr, was reluctant in the past to confront the cleric's Mehdi Army. The militia is blamed for sectarian killings targeting the Sunni minority that was dominant under Saddam Hussain.

"There are many of us. We represent a majority in the country that doesn't want Iraq ... to become a secular state, and a slave to Western powers," Al Sadr added, according to the Rome-based daily.

The Shiite cleric said he is being targeted.

"For this reason, I have moved my family to a secure location. I even have had a will drawn up, and I move continuously in a way that only few can know where I am," he was quoted as saying by Repubblica.

"But even if I were to die, Mehdi would continue to exist. Men can be killed. Faith and ideas cannot," he said.

Al Sadr said that "there are at least four armies" ready to strike against his Mehdi militia: a secret army he said was trained in Jordan by the US military, a private army he said is at the disposal of former Prime Minister Eyad Allawi, Kurdish militias known as peshmergas and US troops.

Al Sadr also denied attending the December 30 hanging of Saddam, dismissing the suggestion as "complete nonsense."

"My men were not there" either, he said. "There were people paid to discredit me. ... The goal was to pass Moqtada off as real enemy of the Sunnis. And they were successful."

The cleric said, however, that he "certainly did not cry" over Saddam's death and added that if it had been up to him "I would have hanged him in a public square for the entire world to see."

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