The Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University reported a New York Times story today about rising violence among Shia factions in the southern Iraqi province of Diyalah. Violence is apparently directed by rival gangs loosely connected to the movement of Moktada al-Sadr against American troops and against supporters of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. Diyalah was strongly supportive of the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, an uprising that ‘lead’ more or less by supporters of al-Sadr’s father.
The Sadrist movement, grouped together under the rubrics of the Jaish al-Mahdi (Army of the Mahdi), the National Cadres party and the Sadriyun faction of the ruling government, has long been a source of instability in Iraq, originally because of Sadr’s own militancy, which was directed both against the Americans and the government and against the Najaf clerical establishment led by Ayatollah Sistani. Recently, however, it has become increasingly apparent that the Jaish al-Mahdi has become highly fragmented. Evidence in Mark Etherington’s excellent book Revolt on the Tigris: The al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq suggests that the Mahdi Army was always more of a loose confederation than a centrally-directed insurgent movement.
There has been substantial concern among observers that the turning over of ‘peaceful’ southern provinces to Iraqi rule was a short-term solution that, in the absence of a functional political system at either the national or the provincial level, would eventually lead to either an uneasy balance of power or to civil war among the Shiites. Though some will point to this as evidence of a coming clash between pro-Iranian Shiites and anti-Iranian Shiites, this is more likely an internal competition for power between various groups.
More Information:
An International Crisis Group report on Moqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army released early this year. In my view it overestimates al-Sadr’s control over his forces.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ has a brief introduction to the Sadrist movement from 2004.
