Product Description

Time magazine listed him as one of its "100 People Who Shape Our World." Newsweek featured him on its cover under the headline "How Al-Sadr May Control U.S. Fate in Iraq." Paul Bremer denounced him as a "Bolshevik Islamist" and ordered that he be captured "dead or alive." Who is Muqtada al-Sadr, and why is he so vital to the future of Iraq and, arguably, the entire Middle East?

In this compellingly readable account, prize-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn tells the story of Muqtada's rise to become the leader of Iraq's poor Shi'ites and the resistance to the occupation. Cockburn looks at the killings by Saddam's executioners and hit men of the young cleric's father, two brothers, and father-in-law; his leadership of the seventy-thousand-strong Mehdi Army; the fierce rivalries between him and other Shia religious leaders; his complex relationship with the Iraqi government; and his frequent confrontations with the American military, including battles that took place in Najaf in 2004. The portrait that emerges is of a complex man and a sophisticated politician, who engages with religious and nationalist aspirations in a manner unlike any other Iraqi leader.

Cockburn, who was among the very few Western journalists to remain in Baghdad during the Gulf War and has been an intrepid reporter of Iraq ever since, draws on his extensive firsthand experience in the country to produce a book that is richly interwoven with the voices of Iraqis themselves. His personal encounters with the Mehdi Army include a tense occasion when he was nearly killed at a roadblock outside the city of Kufa.

Though it often reads like an adventure story, Muqtada is also a work of painstaking research and measured analysis that leads to a deeper understanding both of one of the most critical conflicts in the world today and of the man who may well be a decisive voice in determining the future of Iraq when the Americans eventually leave.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25023 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Cockburn (The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq), a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent, knew the Iraq occupation was doomed when, in 2004, his Irish passport saved him from certain death at the hands of Mehdi Army militiamen convinced he was an American spy: "Bush and Blair never seemed to understand that the problem was not training or equipment, but legitimacy and loyalty." Building on this idea, Cockburn takes a close look at Muqtada al-Sadr, the country's major Shi'ite opposition leader, who has been consistently demonized and belittled by U.S. authorities even as he gains legitimacy among Iraqis. Calling him "the most important and surprising figure to emerge" in post-invasion Iraq, Cockburn details Muqtada's rise, beginning in 1999 when he took his assassinated father's place as head of the Sadrists, a populist religious movement. Mounting frustration toward the U.S. led many to join the Sadrists, the only Shia group to oppose outright the occupation, quickly making Muqtada the political representative of millions. Cockburn's incisive critique of U.S. policy mistakes in Iraq goes back to the first invasion, and draws some dire conclusions, among them that it's too late for Iraq "to exist as anything more than a loose federation." This probing look at a singularly divisive, undoubtedly important figure makes an invaluable resource for anyone weighing U.S. policy in Iraq.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"P atrick Cockburn is, quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today. And now he comes forward to warn us that the end game there is near, and we'd better pay much more attention to Muqtada al-Sadr. Cockburn takes us behind the clichés and half-truths to describe a complicated political operative who will play a huge role in the power struggle that is sure to come." -- Seymour Hersh

"Muqtada is the story of Iraq's least known political figure who, unfortunately for the United States, is arguably its most important. Patrick Cockburn draws on thirty years' experience covering Iraq and his own extraordinary courage to produce this gripping account of the Shiite cleric and his Sadrist movement." -- Peter W. Galbraith

"No serious student of Iraq has failed to incur a debt to the intrepid and intelligent Patrick Cockburn." -- Christopher Hitchens

"P atrick Cockburn is one of the few journalists who has covered the Iraq crisis almost from its beginning. His peerless reporting has been instrumental in uncovering the true dimensions of the tragedy of Iraq. His new book on Muqtada al-Sadr and the radical Shia of Iraq is probing and perceptive." -- Ali Allawi

"N o subject could be more important and, of course, Patrick Cockburn knows Iraq as few foreigners do. The right writer and the right book." -- David Rieff

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter Thirteen

The Fall of Najaf

On August 6, 2004, Abbas Fadhel, a twenty-four-year-old member of a Mehdi Army company, volunteered with a group of other fighters in Sadr City to go to Najaf to take part in the second battle for the city. It had started three days earlier, and shells and bombs were beginning to destroy much of central Najaf as U.S. Marines fought their way toward the Imam Ali shrine. Abbas had some military training because "when the Mehdi Army was set up we used to train in the open agricultural countryside on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad and pretend that we were hunting." In addition, he had fought in the resistance against Saddam Hussein some years earlier in Amara and Nassariya provinces, "so I knew how to use a Kalashnikov and a PKC [Russian-made light machine gun]."

Abbas and his companions, who belonged to Mehdi Army's Ahmed al-Sheibani company, named after the imprisoned representative of Muqtada in Basra, drove in a car on what is normally a two-hour drive from Baghdad. They could see U.S. aircraft bombing groups of young men traveling in the same direction as themselves on the assumption that they were going to join Muqtada's forces. The crashes of the explosions unnerved the young men in the car. "Some got out and disappeared into nearby farms or took lifts in passing cars going back to Baghdad," says Abbas. As they arrived at al-Aoun, a village surrounded by date palms just north of Najaf where Shia insurgents had briefly fought Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard to a standstill in the uprising of 1991, the driver of the car finally lost his nerve. Though he was a follower of Muqtada, he suddenly announced that he was going no farther and was returning to Baghdad. His fear infected others among Abbas's remaining companions, who took their last chance to avoid fighting in a battle in which they knew they were very likely to die. (These defections are striking because they show that the militiamen in Sadr City were not all fanatical fighters carelessly willing to become martyrs for Muqtada and Islam.)

The flight of the driver left the four remaining members of the party that had set out from Baghdad a few hours earlier standing disconsolately beside the road. "We four walked on foot to the Haidaria region using an unpaved dirt track because we were frightened of the American bombardment," recalls Abbas. "We came across a small saloon car whose driver said, 'Get in and I will drive you to Najaf.' I do not think he was entirely in his right mind, though he was not completely crazy, either. As he drove he kept yelling at people beside the road, saying 'You are cowards and agents of the occupier.' We stayed silent and did not speak to him. The situation was very dangerous because we were twice targeted by American snipers and we were very exposed because there were no other cars moving on the roads. He drove us by streets he knew until we were close to the Imam Ali shrine, and would not take any money when he dropped us off, saying, 'This is my work.' Najaf was a ghost city, with all the shops closed and there was nobody to be seen apart from Sadrist fighters." During a bombardment, Abbas, by now reduced to a single companion, took refuge inside the shrine.

When the shelling stopped, the two young men left the city again to rendezvous with a company of Mehdi Army fighters near the so-called Sea of Najaf, a lake just to the west of the city. "They trusted us when we showed them our identity cards, which were given to us in Baghdad, proving that we belonged to the Ahmed al-Sheibani company. We began shooting from a long distance at an American convoy. We never saw American soldiers on foot. They were always in tanks or armored vehicles, even inside the city, and also there were strikes by helicopters." The Mehdi Army militamen were very conscious of their military inferiority compared to the far better equipped U.S. Marines, who could kill them without suffering any equivalent losses. They did what they could to combat American armor. Abbas says that a man named Karim Dra'am, who repaired cars in Sadr City, came to Najaf and modified Katyusha rockets and mortar bombs so they would destroy an American tank, but he was killed in action.

Suffering heavy losses and under continual bombardment, the militiamen were ordered to retreat to the Wadi al-Salaam, the Valley of Peace, the largest cemetery in the world, some six miles by two miles in size, where at least two million Shia are buried, eager to have their final resting place close to the shrine of Imam Ali. Wadi al-Salaam is more of a necropolis or a City of the Dead than a cemetery, and spreads out in a great semicircle around Najaf. A few of its streets are wide enough to drive a car down, but most are winding lanes; only the grave diggers really know the layout. Even under Saddam Hussein, when the Iran-Iraq border was officially closed, pious Shia in Iran and elsewhere would pay border tribes to smuggle the bodies of deceased relatives across the frontier to be buried in Wadi al-Salaam. There are also larger tombs belonging to rich families, which look like small mosques or shrines, their walls painted a vivid pink or green. On the tombs there are sometimes photographs of the dead -- aging sheikhs in Arab headdresses and young men in jackets and ties. Many members of the Mehdi Army who had been killed in the April battles were interred in the Wadi al-Salaam in plots bought by Muqtada, and they were soon to be joined by more of his militiamen.

"We fled to the cemetery and stayed in the crypts and fought from there," relates Abbas, who is very open about his terrifying experience. "The bombing continued day and night. We saw the graves being demolished and our companions killed. We buried the martyrs without washing them because they were martyrs and the weather was hot [Muslims traditionally wash their dead before burying them, but in Wadi al-Salaam there was little water and bodies rapidly decomposed in the heat]." At night the surviving fighters received water and food from the people of Najaf. "The water came in bottles and our food was biscuits twice a day, though in that situation we did not have much appetite. I saw two cars come from Fallujah with humanitarian aid and Muqtada thanked them. We found that there was food on top and weapons underneath. I don't know how they were able to get past American checkpoints. One morning a rumor spread that Sayyid Muqtada had been killed, and some fighters retreated, but others fought even harder. Then in the afternoon Muqtada came and visited the fighters, his hand wrapped in a white bandage. He fought with us and we saw him hold an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade launcher] and fire it at the American tanks. He was always turning up during the battle, though he kept his movements secret."1

***

A second round in the battle for Najaf was always predictable. In the April crisis Muqtada had, surprisingly, emerged as the outright winner in the confrontation that Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority had half provoked and half tumbled into in their clumsy and counterproductive attempt to eliminate Muqtada as a political force. They achieved the exact opposite of what they wanted, elevating Muqtada into a major player as the world watched the Mehdi Army stand up to the U.S. assault for almost a month. Muqtada had been extremely lucky, or had chosen his moment superbly well, in that his uprising coincided precisely with the crisis in Fallujah. Thanks to extraordinary bungling by the CPA, the Sunni insurgents had acquired their own semi-independent capital half an hour's drive west of Baghdad. This diverted U.S. attention and made the U.S. Army nervous about fighting a two-front war against both Sunni and Shia. The CPA made a humiliating retreat from its threat to arrest Muqtada and disarm and disband the Mehdi Army. In any event, many of the militiamen did not even leave Najaf, as its leaders had pledged. "Muqtada gave an order saying everybody had to go back to his family," recalls Ali Ahmed, who took part in the April uprising. "But many of our men stayed inside Najaf saying that the truce was just a lie, and they also moved into nearby regions such as Mashkab, Haidaria, and Abbasia."2

By August the authorities in Baghdad were stronger than they had been in April. An interim Iraqi government had been installed with Iyad Allawi as prime minister on June 28, 2004, and sovereignty had in theory been transferred back to Iraq. There was a great deal less in this than met the eye. The United States had total control over security policy. Freshly raised Iraqi military units were incapable of fighting anybody. The new regime resembled many authoritarian regimes already existing in the Middle East, but unlike them, it did not even have its own security service or control of its own army. The Iraqi National Intelligence Service under General Mohammed al-Shahwani was openly funded by the CIA. Iyad Allawi had long been close to the British intelligence service MI-6 and the CIA. His defense minister, Hazem al-Shalaan, had a personal interest in getting rid of Muqtada, as he had been part of Sayyid Majid al-Khoei's party who had made the fatal journey to Najaf in April 2003. But he had not been prominent in the opposition to Saddam Hussein and, along with the new interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, was a long-term exile with very limited experience of Iraqi life. Both of these security ministers vehemently denounced Muqtada and the Mehdi Army as cat's-paws of Iran during the coming crisis. Such declarations were a joy to the ears of the administration in Washington, but they were untrue or grossly exaggerated. Despite the lessons that should have been learned in the April crisis, the United States and its Iraqi allies still underestimated Shia solidarity and the mass support for Muqtada. This was a serious weakness because the key to destroying Muqtada and his movement was to isolate him from the hawza, the Shia political parties, and the Shia community as a whole.

Muqtada's position was both stronger and weaker than four months earlier. He had solidified his grip on Sadr City and he still subst...

Customer Reviews

A Personal View of the Shia Political Culture and Muqtada al-Sadr
The author provides both a first hand account of the Shia poltical environment after the fall of Saddam's regime as well as a history of the unique and bitter relationship between the Shia and Saddam that is most interesting for westerners as the author explains not only the conflicts between the Shia and Sunni but also between the Shia themselves. The book is not intended to be a bio of Muqtada al-Sadr but to underline his role in the Shia political conflicts within Iraq today. The most interesting aspects of the book is the telling of how the Shia were punished and killed during Saddam regime particularly Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr. In summary yet informative detail, the author explains how the murder of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr caused a split among the Shia particularly those leaders that fled the country and then returned after Saddam's fall. The best example of this violent split is when Sayyid Abdul Majid al-Khoei returns to Iraq to assume a leadership role among the Shia but then is brutally murdered almost at Muqtada al-Sadr's door step. The slaughter of the Shia after the coalition stopped during Deset Storm, after encouraging an uprising, is well discussed with the bitterness it invoked along with the post Iraq war misunderstandings by the U.S. occupation most noted by Paul Bremmer. This is a very concise but well written educational look at the political situation in Iraq. My only criticism is that books in detail on the middle east should have a glossary of terms and a defined character list, for those less familar with middle east terms and titles, and I include myself, to assist the reader.

In depth look at Iraqi Culture and Politics
Cockburn does a wonderful job using day to day interviews to paint a larger picture deserving of the many accolades he has received in the international press. Iraqi society, much more complex and modern than the American media ever paints, is a boiling cauldron fired by the legacy of Saddam, the sanctions, and now the US occupation.

This book is for anyone who wants an understanding of the Iraqi resistance and Muqtada al-Sadr that goes beyond the moronic simplicity of White House press releases.

For What It's Worth
Patrick Cockburn's approximately 30 years of covering Iraq give him the institutional memory, historical perspective and varied sources to deliver a nuanced profile of Muqtada al-Sadr. Cockburn is not the type of journalist to hang around hotels hobnobbing with elites to get his stories, but is willing to risk his life.
Cockburn shows that al-Sadr is more pragmatic than radical and that he only has partial control of the Mahdi Army which is less an army than several volunteer militias with varied agendas. The arrogance and brutality of Saddam Hussein and the Americans who overthrew him is also documented and how it allowed al-Sadr to gain power no matter how perilous his grip on it is.