The Iraq Report: Night of violence reveals Iraq's grave instability

Deadly clashes last night, August 29th, across central and southern Iraq between the supporters of controversial cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his rivals in the overtly pro-Iran Coordination Framework have led to dozens killed and hundreds wounded, including members of the security forces.

The fighting came after Sadr announced that he was permanently retiring from the political sphere. Interestingly, his declaration followed hot on the heels of the resignation of another senior cleric, Kadhim al-Haeri, who acts as a spiritual guide to the Sadrists, from his position as a marji’ – a learned Shia scholar who the laymen are urged to emulate. Haeri not only resigned, but took a veiled stab at Sadr’s legitimacy, helping to spark the current crisis.

While the scenes are both tragic and shocking, this is not the first time that intra-Shia political violence has spilled out onto Iraq’s streets in such dramatic fashion, and it is likely that regional kingmaker Iran will intervene before the violence threatens to tailspin too wildly out of control - and primarily for their own geostrategic interests.

"While the scenes are both tragic and shocking, this is not the first time that intra-Shia political violence has spilled out onto Iraq’s streets in such dramatic fashion"

Clerical cloaks and daggers

Armed clashes broke out not long after Sadr’s retirement announcement. His supporters – who have been in Baghdad’s central squares and its political heart, the Green Zone, for more than a month since they stormed parliament – said that they would not disperse and were awaiting further instructions from their leader.

But Sadr’s supposed retirement came not only after the political impasse that has followed last year’s poorly attended elections, but also after a senior cleric who is seen as being close to the Sadrists decided to throw his lot in with Iran.

Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri is a senior Shia marji’, which means that he not only has religious legislative authority, but he can also levy taxes known as the khums – literally, “the fifth” – that the Shia faithful have to pay to their respective marji’.

Haeri was also once a student of both Sadr’s late father and uncle, the ayatollahs Muhammed Sadiq al-Sadr and Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr. However, and despite the close familial ties, Haeri and the younger Sadr have been at odds with each other since just after the US-led 2003 invasion.

Due to his lack of clerical and scholarly credentials, Sadr relied on his status as the scion of his influential family. While this earned him broad support amongst Iraq’s poorest Shia communities, it did not endear him to those like Haeri who deemed him to be an unlearned upstart.

However, and out of pragmatism and acknowledgement that he lacked the scholarly credentials, Sadr continued to encourage his followers to heed Haeri’s religious edicts even as they followed him politically, creating an internal friction and inherent instability within his own organisation.

These tensions have now culminated in Haeri’s retirement announcement on Sunday, where the aged cleric stated that he would close down his religious offices, would no longer accept the tithes he was due and, most crucially, that his followers ought to instead transfer their loyalty to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the supreme leader of Iran.

This put Sadr in a precarious position, as while he may have his followers’ political loyalty, their religious practice was governed by Haeri’s edicts, and his last edict was for them to swear fealty to the clerical leadership of Iran.

To counter the public relations disaster that was unfolding, Sadr himself announced on Twitter and elsewhere on Monday that he would be permanently retiring from politics, and that while he may not have had the religious credentials, he was at least “enjoining the good, and forbidding the wrong”, which is incumbent on even the laity.

"With each semi or full retirement announcement, the notoriously fickle cleric backtracked and made a return to the scene"

Retirement and violence are not unprecedented

However, this is not the first time that politics and Sadr have disagreed with one another and led to them parting ways – at least temporarily.

Each time Sadr had retired in some way or another, he has invariably sought refuge in Iran.

In 2007, and fearing an American crackdown, Sadr stayed in Iran and had clerics junior to him make statements on his behalf until his return. Similarly, in 2011 after having not been seen for four years, Sadr gave a speech in Najaf to an audience of thousands before retiring to Iran again to “continue his studies”.

Finally, prior to the Islamic State (IS) group taking over a third of Iraq in 2014, Sadr announced that he would retire from politics and wind down his party’s structure in order to “preserve the reputation” of his family’s name.

With each semi or full retirement announcement, the notoriously fickle cleric backtracked and made a return to the scene. And despite his supposed opposition to Iran, each of Sadr’s political sabbaticals ended up with him being hosted by Tehran.

Similar to how his repeated announcements of withdrawal from public life have been repeatedly walked back on, the current spate of violence rocking Iraqi cities from Basra in the south to Baghdad in the centre are not unprecedented.

This is particularly the case between Sadr and his arch-rival, Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki – Iraq’s longest-serving prime minister who was blamed for the rise of IS by parliament – is currently the driving force behind the Sadrists’ main rivals, the Coordination Framework, who are an umbrella organisation of all the overtly pro-Iran Shia Islamist groups in Iraq.

Early on in Maliki’s reign as premier, the tensions between the two Shia Islamists escalated into an all-out military confrontation between Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia on one side and Maliki’s American-backed Iraqi security forces on the other.

Over a period of six days in March 2008, Maliki – backed by British and American forces – failed to dislodge the Mahdi Army from Basra. The fighting in the city caused significant loss of life and damage to public infrastructure.

In the end, a ceasefire was negotiated between the warring parties by Iran, leading Sadr to command his men to stand down and leaving Maliki in the ascendant, a pattern that has repeated itself ever since.

While history does not always repeat itself exactly, certain trends give good indication as to where the current crisis will take Iraq. With Iran being the main beneficiary of the US-led invasion in 2003, which catapulted it into its present position as the most influential regional actor after Israel, it is highly unlikely that Tehran will simply stand by.

Instead, it would not be beyond the scope of imagination for Iran to engage in intensive diplomacy, including threats and coercion, to get the situation in Iraq to stabilise once more with the status quo of the past two decades that it has benefited from so much secured once again.

In this scenario, there are no real winners amongst the Iraqi factions. Iran would continue its winning streak by imposing its dominion and influence over the war-ravaged country. If past protests against Iranian hegemony are anything to go by, an Iranian intervention in this crisis will simply kick the can down the road, and we can expect more significant turbulence in the near future.

The Iraq Report is a regular feature at The New Arab.

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