Shiite role key to transition

The U.S.-led administration's plan to begin handing over political power to Iraqis will be tested above all in Najaf's cobbled alleys, crowded with clerics and lined with religious bookstores.

Seven key Iraqi political leaders are set to meet hundreds of miles from here in northern Iraq to decide whether to join a U.S.-proposed governing council. The one organisation whose membership is crucial to the council but still deeply in doubt is the Najaf-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which represents many Shiites.

The U.S.-led occupation authority can't afford to ignore Shiite leaders, in part because they have a broad popular support in southern Iraq, which is almost entirely Shiite. At least until recently, the region has been relatively friendly to U.S. and British soldiers.

Shiites, who represent about 60 per cent of Iraq's population, are anything but a monolithic group. Shiites can be found who are secular or religious; intellectuals or labourers; sympathetic to the U.S.-led coalition or resentful for its failure to bring change and political power more rapidly.

Bringing influential religious Shiites on board has proved difficult and is potentially troublesome for the Americans. Shiite religious leaders are expected to push hard for a constitution that designates Islam as the state religion, and they might attempt to make Iraq an Islamic state.

Although many Iraqi religious Shiites reject the idea of rebuilding their country in the image of Iran, the Iranian influence is strong – especially in southern Iraq.

Western policymakers in Iraq are split over the degree of Iranian influence. Some high-ranking diplomats in the U.S.-led administration believe the more extreme Iranian elements are being kept in check, but others seem fearful of Iran's clout. One U.S. official in Iraq recently described the Shiite south as "the new frontline in the war with Iran."

The greatest uncertainty for the moment may be the status of the Badr brigade, a militia controlled by Iran that is loosely associated with the Supreme Council.

However, there appears to be a fairly widespread belief that the Shiites will lean more toward London and Washington than Tehran.

"I've been encouraged that Shiite leaders by and large are moderate; they advocate the separation of religion and state and are resistant to the Iranian influence," said Ambassador John Sawers, the top British diplomat who works for L. Paul Bremer III, the American director of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Of the seven groups meeting in northern Iraq, only the Supreme Council has a religious basis. Others, such as Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, are secular, or in the case of the two main Kurdish parties, defined by their ethnicity.

The groups were largely formed in exile from Saddam's Iraq, but soon after the war their leaders returned and most have been working with the U.S.-led administration to create an interim Iraqi government until a constitution is written and elections held. That process is expected to take roughly a year.