Moqtada Al Sadr's return to Najaf, after four years in self-imposed exile, means that payback time has started in Iraq for Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki. Had it not been for Al Sadr's support, after all, Al Maliki would never have formed a government last December.
Al Maliki either ignored — or revoked — an arrest warrant issued in Al Sadr's name for the 2003 murder of top Shiite leader Abdul Majid Khoei.
As hundreds of thousands showed up to greet the 37-year-old cleric, the central government looked the other way, although it knew — for sure — that this man was back to give everybody in Baghdad, a painful headache.
Reportedly, the Qom-based heavyweight Ayatollah Kazem Al Haeri was the one who made it all happen, talking Al Sadr into supporting Al Maliki's second term as prime minister last November.
His ‘nudge' had Iran's fingerprints all over it, given that Iranian officials wanted Al Maliki to succeed — at any cost, in order to prevent the secular Eyad Allawi from becoming prime minister.
Al Sadr himself is expected to visit Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani and Ammar Al Hakim of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), two of Iran's prime allies in Iraq whom he had strongly challenged, either covertly or overtly, during the years 2005-07.
He is then expected to bring discipline to his troops and help enforce law and order in Iraq, very contrary to the role he had played during the bloody events of 2003-08.
The sticking point will be talking Al Sadr into accepting the seven posts allocated to his team by Al Maliki. Currently he is frowning upon all of them, seeing his cabinet share as too little and too ceremonial for someone who controls 40 out of 325 seats in Parliament.
Al Sadr after all, has recently been granted the ministries of housing, water resources, tourism and antiquities, and two cabinets without portfolios. None of the so-called sovereignty posts, interior, defence, economy, or foreign affairs, had been given to the Sadrist bloc.
Seeking control
In the past, however, the Sadrist share of the first Al Maliki government included the Ministry of Commerce, which gave him control of the economic lifeline of Iraq, and health, where a network of hospitals and clinics allowed him to distribute medical services to his followers — left and right — to keep them loyal and happy.
Additionally the Ministry of Education was the jackpot for Al Sadr, because it granted him access to the minds of schoolchildren, allowing him to preach his political and religious views to all Iraqis, not only those living in his strongholds of Sadr City, Mosul, and Najaf.
And what makes things worse is that Al Sadr had all of that when he controlled only 29 out of 275 seats in Parliament (10.5 per cent). At the time, Al Maliki tremendously needed Al Sadr, given that nobody knew him in Iraq when he was first elected prime minister in 2006.
Al Sadr legitimised him among day-to-day Shiites, while Al Maliki pledged to empower the Sadrists in government and protect them from the US dragnet. That alliance snapped in 2007, when Al Sadr became more of an embarrassment than an asset for Al Maliki as he tried to cement his ties with the Arab world.
Because of Al Sadr, many Arabs in the Gulf continued to regard Al Maliki as nothing but an Iranian stooge, especially after his hoodlums chanted ‘Moqtada, Moqtada' while Saddam Hussain was being hanged in December 2006.
At this point, four months after the Israeli war on Lebanon, the Iranians began planning for a revamp of the Sadrists in Iraq. Tehran reasoned that one day, because of another war with Israel, a civil war in Lebanon, or a peace process in the Middle East, the Hezbollah would get distracted and no longer operate to its full capacity.
To complement its activities, the Iranians decided to create a similar military group in Iraq, either from the Badr Brigade, old protégés of the Iranians, or Al Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Iran began to revamp the Sadrists, seeing that the ingredients that led to the formation of the Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 were identical to those that existed in Iraq; occupation, chaos, arms, and religiously-driven Shiites who complained of being treated as an underclass, for far too long.
This is when Al Sadr issued a ‘freeze' on all activities of the Mahdi Army, aimed at filtering all undisciplined elements from the Sadrist team. Remaining troops were then sent into concentrated training in politics, religion, military affairs, and strategy — building on the immensely successful Hezbollah model in Lebanon.
Al Sadr himself returned to the religious schools, to rise from a ‘sayyed' into an ‘ayatollah', so he can one day issue religious decrees (fatwas) to his followers.
Anyone who doubts how much progress Al Sadr has made needs only to listen to his inflammatory speech in Najaf last weekend, which sounded like something ripped right out of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah's manual.
Now, Al Sadr is seemingly ready to make a full political comeback — revamped, older, wiser, and stronger, thanks to the Iranian face-lift he underwent since 2007.
