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Posted on 04/13/2003 5:25:57 PM PDT by DoctorZIn
Armed men continued to besiege the home of Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Sunday giving him until Monday to leave the country or face attack, aides to the cleric claimed.
The stand-off is a worrying sign of volatility and religious strife among Iraq’s majority community and raises concerns of national unity in post-war Iraq.
Tensions are rising among Najaf's Shia community
Kuwait-based Ayatollah Abul Qasim Dibaji accused Jimaat-E-Sadr-Thani, led by Moqdada Sadr, of trying to take control of the holy sites of Iraq.
“Armed thugs and hooligans have had the house of Ayatollah Sistani under siege since yesterday,” said Dibaji.
Sadr is the 22-year-old son of late Iraqi spiritual leader Mohammad Sadeq Sadr, killed in 1999 with two other sons. Their deaths are widely blamed on the Iraqi secret service for supporting Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Associates of Sadr denied he had any links with the siege or killing last week in Najaf’s main shrine of senior Shia cleric Abdul Majid Al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile.
A leading Shia cleric in Kuwait also accused Sadr’s followers of threatening another cleric in Najaf, Sayyed Mohammad Said Al-Hakim with unspecified punishment unless he pledged allegiance to Muqtada Sadr.
Hakim is the nephew of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Al-Hakim, who heads the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the main Shia group that opposed Iraq's former president Saddam Hussein.
Abdul Hassan Al-Fajaji, an official of the London-based Al-Khoei foundation, said on Sunday evening there was no change in Najaf’s security situation, describing it as “very bad.”
“People are screaming, crying, talking to the men to stop that against their marja (spiritual leader) but no one listens,” he said. “That’s very dangerous for our religion if something happens.”
Some Shia sources said US troops stationed on the outskirts of Najaf had entered the city to help restore order. The US military had no confirmation of the move.
Fajaji said US forces were not intervening. “I asked them to protect us, but they say it is not their business,” he added.
Abed Al-Budairi, an aide to the pro-Western Khoei, said Sistani left his Najaf home before it was surrounded by men wielding knives and guns but that Sistani’s son was in the building.
Najaf is a centre of pilgrimage and religious learning and home to the tomb of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad and considered the first Shia imam.
“This is the biggest catastrophe. Total terror reigns in Najaf,” said Dibaji. “Najaf is a main centre of learning, like Oxford in England. It has more than 1,000 years of history.”
Senior Shia leaders have accused Jimaat-E-Sadr-Thani of orchestrating the killing of Khoei, who witnesses say was hacked to death by an angry mob outside the Imam Ali mosque days after returning from London under the protection of US forces. According to AFP, a spokesperson for the accused group has denied the charge.
Budairi said he believed Sistani had been targeted because he was Iranian born and groups opposing him wanted an Iraqi as the spiritual leader in Najaf.
Power Struggle
A senior Shia opposition leader in Tehran condemned the siege. “We hope that the wise clerics in Iraq manage to control those with more hardline tendencies and remind them that what is happening in Najaf does not benefit the Iraqi people,” he said.
Lebanon’s leading Shia cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah issued a statement telling Muslims to use all means to defend Sistani from an “evil assault.”
Relatives say Khoei, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abdul Qasim Al-Khoei and Iraq’s highest Shia religious authority in the world at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, was the victim of a power struggle for control of Najaf.
His family in London on Saturday insisted his role in Najaf had been “purely humanitarian, not political.” According to relatives, all the Al-Khoei brothers, except one were killed by the Baath regime or disappeared.
Confused scenarios of the circumstances of Majid Al-Khoei’s death continue to emerge. One of his companions, Abu Tarek, told the Al-Mu’tamar newspaper published by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraq National Congress in London said six people-not two-had been killed in the clashes outside of the Najaf mosque.
Abu Tarek was quoted as saying those killed were three of Al-Khoei’s nephews who lived in Najaf and the man who was allegedly the real target of the violence, Haider Al-Kilidar, who had long been related to the Baath regime, according to a journalist with Al-Mu’tamar.
Does anyone know if he is pro US or pro Islamic Republic?
The direction the Shite population decide to persue will have a huge impact on our efforts to create a legitimate secular demrocratic republic in Iraq.
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Questions for one's self when contemplating all things Middle-Eastern:
1. When has the Arab media ever gotten the story correct
2. When has Jihad ever worked
3. When was the Arab Street not ever angry
His lieutenant was the one killed when he tried to protect a saddam appointed cleric from a mob.
Hopefully our troops will adapt to prevent the suicide bombings, but expect to see the country dissolve into Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence as these barbarians go through the long, slow period of cultural evolution the Muslim world has never experienced.
I am truly afraid of the future--particularly, of what kind of shape we are going to leave Iraq in. As bad as Saddam was, and as glad as we all are to see him gone, his absence could lead to years of civil war and genocide in the near future between Kurds, Assyrian Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, all of whom hate each other. The Turks might get their hands into the thing as well.
I'm glad we won, but the jury is definitely still out as far as whether we have improved the Iraqis' lot. I will believe Bush is a miracle worker if he manages to make this work.
A few and almost all of Bush's administration.
No starry eyes in the White House but simply pragmatists who recognized the urgent necessity to remove a virilent pan-Arabist who was on the verge of doing widespread, domestic damage in the US.
Given a moral choice between sadistict control and self inflicted destruction the choice is simple. After having provided an alternative, which has yet to be accomplished, we are not responsible for the cultural insanities of the Iraqi masses.
Blowing away huge sections of their populaces does not seem to trouble the Islamic mind.....eventually the thing rights itself in time.
If they weaken themselves..they do so now before Israel and the "Great Satan".
These leaders have there issue's with each other....they will however set that aside..in view of getting at Israel and the U.S.
As Fouad Adjami comments...."The Rulers are afraid",...the Mosque decides all their futures.
The Mosque....the castle of middle earth.
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