http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=397634
The Shia of Najaf seethe ominously, fearing the yoke of US occupation
By Phil Reeves in Najaf
16 April 2003
** The message could not have been clearer if the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani himself had broadcast it from the battery of loudspeakers that hang above the breathtaking blue mosaics lining the walls of his mosque.
The powerful cleric’s multitude of followers in Najaf, one of the holiest Shia cities, will not accept an Iraqi government run by anyone they see as a stooge of the occupying Americans.
They are not interested in retired Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the rumbustious former missile contractor leading the effort to rebuild Iraq, who – 150 miles further down the Euphrates – was chairing the first meeting of selected Iraqi opposition groups. Objecting to the American general’s role, the largest Shia party, the Iranian-based Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, refused to go.
And they have nothing good to say about Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi businessman, convicted fraudster and favourite of the Pentagon hawks. After decades in exile, he was spirited into Nasiriyah last week by US forces and has since formed his own militia. **
Bearded men drawn by the sight of a foreigner who, for once, was without an Iraqi government snoop and who had not swept into Najaf with the US tanks, crowded around yesterday, desperate for these views to be heard.
As we sat in the sun and the swirling dust, their theme was the same, time and again. They were delighted the Americans had got rid of Saddam Hussein, whose thugs had oppressed the Shias, killing clerics and closing mosques, and whose social engineering had left them in profound poverty.
The US and Britain must fulfil their obligations under Geneva Conventions as occupiers, they said. The Allies must establish order, end the looting and provide power, medicine, and food supplies. Then they must leave.
“Iraq has to be run by people from Iraq, people who lived in Iraq and not from the outside,” said one of the crowd, Favel Mohammed Roda, a fiery-eyed man in a white robe. “Then Americans must get out.” The others shouted agreement.
Iraq’s Shia community is seething, consumed by fears about its place in the new Iraq. Being the majority, they talk hopefully of democracy. Yet they are haunted by the suspicion of conspiracies to split their ranks. Some here say these plots are the work of die-hard Saddamists; others suspect the hand of the CIA, suggesting the US is moving to prevent them becoming the most powerful force in the land by sheer numbers.
Such suspicions were thriving yesterday in the narrow lanes of Najaf. A crowd of men, the heads of Shia families, had donned their robes and turbans and travelled in from outlying villages. They gathered outside Ayatollah Sistani’s headquarters yards from the golden-domed Iman Ali shrine, brandishing banners proclaiming the unity of Iraq’s Shias. They had come to defend the cleric after learning his premises had been surrounded by armed men, who had demanded he leave Iraq in 48 hours.
The cleric was nowhere to be seen, but his son said he was safe. “There is no government and there are a lot of weapons in the hands of dangerous people,” he said. ** Six days ago, one of the ayatollah’s close associates, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was stabbed to death by a mob in the shrine.Mr Khoei was an acquaintance of Tony Blair and Jack Straw, and had returned to Iraq after 12 years in exile in London, bearing the weight of Washington and Whitehall’s hopes that he would help lead Iraq’s Shias towards a pro-US government, and away from the magnetic pull of neighbouring Iran.
His US links may have cost him his life. “He is so close to the Americans he might as well have driven in on an American tank,” Mr Roda said. ** But he may also have been killed because he went to the shrine with a cleric loathed by Najaf’s Shias. They said the cleric had ties to the dictator’s killers who murdered another revered ayatollah, Mohammed al-Sadr, in 1998. And in the town of Kut, a strongly anti-American cleric called Said Abbas this week took control of city hall with 30 armed men.
Outside, several hundred Iranians living in Iraq protested against the American-led invasion. They singled out the man they know the Pentagon’s hardliners favour. “No to Chalabi!” they shouted.
shia on shia? that one is nearly as good as the wmd spoof.