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COMMENTARY
August 7, 2004
Slaughtering them
They don't care if they die in fact they hope to die. They do not aspire to be reasonable in fact they take pride in hair-trigger tempers and will lay down their lives in response to the slightest provocation. The "militants" who make up Muqtada al-Sadr's "Imam Mahdi army" the Shia blackshirts of Iraq are not fighting for the future of Iraq but for God Allah . They have memorized the Koran and they dream in words and live by the harangues of their fanatic mullahs. In this they are like the enemy both Shia and Sunni from Palestine to Kashmir to Chechnya to London and Madrid: the various faces of a radical Jihadi Islam from which the West continues to shrink. Over the last three days U.S. soldiers have killed several hundred of these blackshirts in Najaf Shia Islam's holiest city; some dozens more in the main Baghdad Shia slum; and still more in three other towns. The same information comes from the U.S. military and the Iraqi government: after a period of relative quiet al-Sadr delivered another pulpit war cry ("terrorize the enemy") and off they went to get slaughtered. The U.S. Marines can kill them in considerable numbers without taking casualties themselves; such men as they have lost have been ambushed. As before there was no general uprising in support of al-Sadr. Even in the torrid Shia slum in Baghdad other Iraqis simply dashed for cover. The main market stayed open. A sane rational Western observer must ask himself Why don't they give up? They don't because they are not rational and not operating on worldly motives. Yet for all the evidence accumulated the Western mind still refuses to grasp the nature of an enemy that shares none of our secular assumptions and whose religious doctrines are when compared with the Christian ones we dimly remember also quite opposite. Al-Sadr was given the luxury of many weeks to regroup in return for promising the current Iraqi government and the provisional authority which preceded it that he would end the violence. His supporters had been nearly annihilated in the disturbances he began in April; yet he continues to recruit among young unemployed men whom he promises only "a martyr's death". By political calculation the new Iraqi government continues to instruct the Americans not to finish him off (they fear that would trigger a broader Shia uprising); and haven't the means or the will to finish him themselves. For the honour of Islam it should be pointed out that al-Sadr is not even a full ayatollah. His prestige comes from the legacy of his father and two brothers whom Saddam Hussein had killed. His father was a grand ayatollah the brothers were fully-trained religious scholars; the young Muqtada al-Sadr is mostly self-taught. He has survived because he is good at hiding and shameless about travelling in disguise. He almost certainly receives extensive help including weapons and training for his blackshirts from agents of the Iranian regime (several of whom have been caught making deliveries). Iran's ayatollahs hardly want al-Sadr to prevail; he is too crazy and unreliable even for them. What they do want is chaos in Iraq and al-Sadr has a talent for delivering it. The U.S. hesitates in this election season from pursuing that Iranian connexion. They have two "wars" on their hands (counting Afghanistan) and don't want another. The view of the Bush White House is put out one fire at a time. We must wait for a new view until after the U.S. election. Until now they and the Iraqi authorities have relied heavily on Grand Ayatollah Sistani the "patriarch" to counsel moderation among the Shia majority. But he has a serious heart condition and yesterday had to be flown to London for emergency medical treatment. Al-Sadr's thugs mark their time between uprisings by installing their own preachers in local mosques and appointing themselves as guards in hospitals schools orphanages and even municipal offices. They enforce dress codes on the streets and beat up Assyrian Christians and members of other minorities. As befits people animated by a deathwish they are remarkably brazen in appropriating money and goods for their "charitable purposes". Al-Sadr is probably betting he will have more luck as an incendiary with Sistani out of the picture. My impression from a range of sources is that al-Sadr remains incapable of triggering any larger eruption than he has triggered already. But until the authorities summon the will to kill him and hunt down his supporters to the last man his torch burns amid the dry tinder of another summer in Iraq. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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