Iraqi Shiites Protest Bahrain Crackdown
By TIM ARANGO
Published: March 18, 2011
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BAGHDAD – In the southern port city of Basra, the slums of Sadr City, the divided city of Kirkuk in the north and other areas across Iraq, followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the populist Shiite cleric, flooded the streets after Friday prayers to denounce the violence unleashed on Shiite demonstrators in Bahrain and the presence of Saudi troops there.
In Kirkuk demonstrators chanted slogans against Saudi Arabia, asking why, if it can send troops to Bahrain, it hasn’t sent an army to “free Palestine,” while a preacher in a mosque in Sadr City, the vast Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, said volunteers were ready to go to Bahrain to help their fellow Shiites.
Saudi troops rolled into Bahrain Tuesday to help quash the demonstrations there. They moved in as part of a force of 2,000 under the aegis of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an alliance of Sunni rulers.
“No, No to America! No, no to Israel! No, no to the occupier!” the preacher, Sayid Muhanad al-Moussawi, exhorted his followers. Sheik Maytham al-Jumairi, a member of the Bahraini opposition, took part in the Sadr City demonstrations, saying, “there are real massacres in Bahrain, it is a bath of blood.”
The protests were a show of Shiite solidarity against the Sunni ruling class of Bahrain with echoes of Iraq’s own sectarian history – the American invasion here upended decades of oppression by a Sunni government over an impoverished Shiite majority – but the demonstrations were also weighted with deeper meaning for Iraq’s own current politics.
In his ability to move his supporters from the mosque to the street, Mr. Sadr is perhaps the most pivotal Iraqi public figure aside from the prime minister, and the Friday protests were another signal to the political class here of Mr. Sadr’s power. Members of parliament affiliated with Mr. Sadr, who once led an anti-American insurgency and whose militia fought the Iraqi army as recently as 2008, were instrumental in ending the months-long deadlock after last year’s election. In January Mr. Sadr returned to Iraq from his exile in Iran, although he has since gone back to Qum, Iran, to carry on his religious studies. Last month, when thousands of protesters decried corruption and demanded better services, including basics like electricity, in gatherings inspired by the protests in Egypt and Tunisia and organized in part on Facebook, Mr. Sadr told his supporters to give the government time, and they stayed off the streets.
Instead, Mr. Sadr gave the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki six months to improve services before he would direct his supporters to demonstrate against the government. “By slogans, by speech, Moktada is able to push people,” said Ibrahim al-Sumydai, an Iraqi political analyst.
The political nightmare for Mr. Maliki, who largely owes his second term as prime minister to the support of the Sadrist bloc, is mobs of Sadr supporters demonstrating against the Iraqi government.
“We’d find maybe a million people demonstrating against the Iraqi government,” said Mr. Sumydai.
Mr. Sadr’s political power and his steadfast anti-Americanism – to this day Sadrist lawmakers refuse to speak with American diplomats – has also complicated negotiations between the United States government and Mr. Maliki over what the American role will be in Iraq after the end of 2011, when all American troops are scheduled to leave. The conundrum is this: most diplomats and security officials on both sides agree that Iraq will still need American forces for training and advising well beyond 2011, but it is so politically risky for Mr. Maliki to maintain an American presence that he may not ask for one, as he must under the current security agreement that binds the two nations.
The upshot is that domestic politics here has severely hampered negotiations over the future Iraqi-American relationship.
The protests across Iraq on Friday, which has lately become a day for protest as well as prayer across the Middle East, appeared to eclipse, at least in sheer size, the large demonstration last month that was billed as a “Day of Rage.” The protests in Iraq on Friday were largely peaceful.
The issue of Bahrain has exposed Iraq’s still-evident sectarian tensions. Sunni mosques were largely silent on the issue Friday, and in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, perhaps a few hundred gathered to demand the release of detainees, but they were dispersed by security forces for not having permission to gather.
Both sides seized on the sectarian implications of Bahrain: In the holy Shiite city of Najaf, in southern Iraq, an estimated 3,000 people gathered, some of them chanting, “Saudi is a signal for sectarianism!”
Sheik Ali Hulael, a preacher at a Sunni mosque in Anbar, criticized the pro-Bahrain demonstrations as being motivated by sectarianism and described them as a diversion from the issues facing Iraq. “The timing of these demonstrations in Iraq now is really bad,” he said. “The situation can really be escalated again in Iraq if they do not put an end to it.”
Duraid Adnan and Zaid Thaker contributed reporting from Baghdad; Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Basra, Kirkuk, Najaf, Sadr City and Anbar Province.
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