IRAQ - The Sadrist Challenge.

The Sadrist movement has re-emerged with a shrewd two-tiered strategy which reaches out to Iraqis on the street and distances it from the increasingly unpopular government. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from government, thus contributing to the political paralysis noted in a White House report on July 12. That outsider status has enhanced Sadr's appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less relevant to their daily lives.

Sadr, still away from the public, has been working tirelessly to build support at the grass roots, opening new store-front offices across Baghdad and southern Iraq which dispense services not being provided by the government. In this he seems to be following the model established by Hizbullah in Lebanon, as well as Iran's Palestinian/Islamist ally Hamas in Gaza, with entwined social and military wings serving as a parallel government. He has extended the reach of his JaM.

JaM has effectively taken over vast swaths of Baghdad and is fighting government troops in several southern provinces. Although the militia sometimes uses brutal tactics, including death squads, many vulnerable Shi'ites are grateful for the protection it affords. At the same time, JaM is not entirely under Sadr's control, and he publicly denounces the most notorious killers fighting in his name. That frees him to extend an olive branch to Sunni Arabs and Christians, while championing the Shi'ite identity of his political base.

On May 25, in his first public Friday prayer in months, he explicitly forbade sectarian attacks. He told his Shi'ite audience in a much-publicised sermon: "It is prohibited to spill the blood of Sunnis and Iraqi Christians. They are our brothers, either in religion or in the homeland".

Almost from the day US troops entered Iraq, the mercurial Sadr has confounded American and Iraqi politicians alike. He quickly rallied impoverished Shi'ites in peaceful displays of Shi'ite strength, as had his father who had a tribal approach but was executed by Saddam's regime in 1999 (see rim6-IraqSadrVsHakimJun11-07).

When the Sunni Arab insurgency gained momentum, Sadr raised a Shi'ite insurgency in direct opposition to the US-backed Iraqi government which had excluded him.

Sadr's basic tenets are widely shared. Like most Iraqis, he opposes the US military presence and wants a timetable for departure - if only to attain some certainty that the Americans will leave eventually. He wants the country to stay unified and opposes the efforts of those Shi'ites under the Hakim clan who have had close ties to Iran to create a semi-autonomous Shi'ite region in southern Iraq.

After his JaM was defeated in a battle against US forces in Najaf in 2004, Sadr established himself as a political player, using the votes of loyal MPs to give Maliki the margin needed to win the post of prime minister. Now that the leadership is in poor repute, Sadr has shifted once again.

The mainstream political parties in Iraq see Sadr as unpredictable and manipulative, but too politically and militarily important to ignore. The New York Times on July 18 quoted independent Shi'ite MP and political science professor at Baghdad University Jaber Habeeb as saying of Sadr: "He's powerful. This is a fact you have to accept, even if you don't like it".

The latest stance by the more conventional political parties is to keep Sadr at arm's length. The two major Shi'ite parties, Maliki's Da'wa and Hakim's SIIC, along with the two Kurdish parties, have been negotiating to form a new moderate coalition. Sadr's political leaders were told he was welcome to join, but the invitation came belatedly, after the other groups had all but completed their discussions. Sadr's lieutenants announced that he had no interest in joining.

Joost Hiltermann, the director of the International Crisis Group's office in Amman says: "Sadr holds the political centre in Iraq. They (the Sadrists) are nationalist, they want to hold the country together and they are the only political organisation that has popular support among the Shi'as. If you try to exclude him from any alliance, well, it's a nutty idea, it's unwise".

The mainstream parties talk about Sadr carefully. Some never mention his followers or JaM by name, but speak elliptically of "armed groups". Others acknowledge his position but are reserved on the challenge he poses. Shi'ite Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a top SIIC official, says: "Muqtada al-Sadr is one of the political leaders of this country. We disagree on some things, we have differences. We have to work to solve our differences".

The Sadrists exhibit a quiet confidence, and are pulling ever more supporters into their ranks. Shaikh Salah al-Obaidi, the chief spokesman and a senior strategist for Sadr's movement in Najaf, says: "The Sadr movement cannot be marginalised; it is the popular base. We will not be affected by efforts to push us to one side because we are the people. We feel the people's day-to-day sufferings".

Sadr's offices are accessible store-fronts which dispense a little bit of everything: food, money, clothes, medicine and information. From just one office in Baghdad and one in Najaf in 2003, the Sadr operation has ballooned. It now has full-service offices in most provinces and nine in Baghdad, as well as several additional store-front centres.

In some areas, JaM militiamen come around once a month to charge a nominal fee for protection. In others, they control the fuel supply, and in some, where sectarian killings have gone on, they control the market for empty houses. JaM is deeply involved in sectarian killings.

In a vicious campaign in the Amil area in western Baghdad, once a mixed working-class neighbourhood of Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs, it has driven out many Sunnis and isolated others in a few enclaves. Many mornings, the bodies of several Sunni Arabs are dumped in a brick-strewn lot near the neighbourhood's entrance.

Among Shi'ites, JaM is viewed as their best form of protection from Sunni Arab insurgents. JaM's darker side is rarely discussed in Shi'ite areas. In Amil, some people fiercely reject any suggestion that JaM runs death squads. Others might admit to some problems, but dismiss them as the excesses of a few bad apples.