Inside Iraqi Politics

[Surferbeetle]

From the 7th July 2008 CSM

Already Mr. Sadr's partisans and members of his Mahdi Army militia believe that ISCI and its affiliate party, the Badr Organization – previously known as the Badr Brigade and ISCI's armed wing – instigated the recent US-Iraqi military operations against the Mahdi Army in southern Iraq and Baghdad. They allege it was part of an ISCI/Badr plot to dismantle Sadr's organization ahead of elections.

On Friday, Sheikh Salim al-Darraji, an ISCI official based in Basra, was assassinated in a part of the city traditionally controlled by Sadrists. It comes one week after Basra's chief of military intelligence was killed in a predominantly Shiite part of eastern Baghdad.

The ultimate goal of ISCI and Badr is to consolidate their grip on southern Iraq and to create a nine-province Shiite region on par with the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north. This is a subject of great controversy among many Iraqis, including the Sadrists.

"We believe the elections are extremely important. We will run jointly with (ISCI). We both have a significant base of public support," says Hadi al-Ameri, Badr's leader and a senior member of the Iraqi parliament.

Mr. Ameri's announcement marks a stark departure from ISCI's strategy during the January and December 2005 elections when it was the pivotal player in assembling a grand Shiite coalition, known as the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). That bloc swept the largest number of seats in parliament and ushered into power the Shiites and Kurds, who came in second.

There also is no indication that ISCI and Badr will abandon their strategy of overtly associating themselves with Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, the Najaf-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, as they did in the 2005 elections when they used his image on pamphlets and posters promoting the UIA.