Today’s Must Read

The anti-American Iraqi cleric that the surge was supposed to marginalize is back in a big way.

Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army twice fought the U.S. in 2004 and who has emerged as a premier power broker among Iraq’s majority Shiites, went into hiding at the beginning of the surge in February. As U.S. and Iraqi forces pushed into his Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City, the Bush administration pointed to Sadr’s disappearance as an early victory for the escalation. But after months of behind-the-scenes rancor with the government of Nouri al-Maliki — whose rise to power Sadr effectively sponsored — Sadr emerged two weeks ago in the Shiite city of Kufa to again demand a U.S. withdrawal. And now, McClatchy’s Leila Fadel reports, Sadr isn’t shying away from his public, giving a rare interview to Iraqi state TV.

Perhaps most troublesome for the U.S. and the Maliki government, Sadr is increasingly portraying himself as a nationalist solution to the sectarian crisis in Iraq. As his interview reveals, his argument depends on a distressing conflation — that the true enemies of both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis are the twin menaces of the U.S. and al-Qaeda. Maliki, he further argues, is powerless against the threat.

In the interview, al-Sadr said that “the layers of government and parties are turning their backs on the people.” He added that the government is only half-hearted in its efforts to serve the people.

He said that Sunnis and Shiites have a common enemy – Sunni extremists, known in Iraqi Arabic as takfir. In Islam, takfir is the act of declaring someone an infidel.

“The enemy of all Islam has become the takfir,” al-Sadr said. “Before they were killing Shiites with their car bombs. Now they are killing Sunnis with their car bombs. They have become a common enemy.”

Al-Sadr, believed to be in his early 30s, sat before an Iraqi flag and the green Mahdi Army flag for the interview.

He ticked off a laundry list of Iraq’s problems – sectarianism, lack of services, lack of security, the Mahdi Army’s reputation as a brutal killer of Sunnis. But the culprit was always the same – “the occupation.”

If that wasn’t enough, Sadr has shown success in recent weeks reaching out to the very Sunnis the U.S. relies on to fight al-Qaeda: the tribal alliance in Anbar Province known as the Anbar Salvation Front. The TV appearance suggests that despite the surge’s objective of suppressing the anti-American cleric, Sadr appears to be gaining strength at the expense of the U.S. and the Maliki government.