Sudarsan Raghavan has an important front-page piece in the Washington Post today on what appears to be a major overhaul of Moqtada al-Sadr’s political tactics. Sadr seems to be making a new play: giving up on Maliki’s government and “moderating” the Mahdi image. Raghavan calls it one of the most “dramatic tactical shifts since the beginning of the war” for Sadr’s movement.
The 33-year-old populist is reaching out to a broad array of Sunni leaders, from politicians to insurgents, and purging extremist members of his Mahdi Army militia who target Sunnis. Sadr’s political followers are distancing themselves from the fragile Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which is widely criticized as corrupt, inefficient and biased in favor of Iraq’s majority Shiites. And moderates are taking up key roles in Sadr’s movement, professing to be less anti-American and more nationalist as they seek to improve Sadr’s image and position him in the middle of Iraq’s ideological spectrum.
“We want to aim the guns against the occupation and al-Qaeda, not between Iraqis,” Ahmed Shaibani, 37, a cleric who leads Sadr’s newly formed reconciliation committee, said as he sat inside Sadr’s heavily guarded compound here.
The whole piece is definitely worth reading. As Juan Cole noted, Sadr may very well be “maneuvering to have a Sadrist PM succeed al-Maliki if the latter’s government fall.”
Naturally, given the circumstances, Sadr’s “reform” efforts and outreach to Sunnis are viewed with skepticism. Raghavan spoke with a Sunni seamstress who lives in Baghdad’s Risala neighborhood, who was recently forced to flee from her home by the Mahdi Army, which broke her young son’s leg during a home invasion.
“Moqtada is saying something, but on the ground they are doing something else,” she said. Sadr’s call to reconcile with Sunnis is “all nonsense,” she added. “They want to know who the Sunnis are, so they can start butchering people at their own pace.”
