Kuwait-based Ayatollah Abul Qasim Dibaji accused Jimaat-E-Sadr-Thani, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, of trying to take control of the holy sites of Iraq. “Armed thugs and hooligans have had the house of Ayatollah Sistani under siege since yesterday,” said Dibaji. Sadr is the 22-year-old son of late Iraqi spiritual leader Mohammad Sadeq Sadr, killed in 1999 with two other sons. Their deaths are widely blamed on the Iraqi secret service for supporting Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Associates of Sadr denied he had any links with the siege or killing last week in Najaf’s main shrine of senior Shia cleric Abdul Majid Al-Khoei, who had just returned from exile. A leading Shia cleric in Kuwait also accused Sadr’s followers of threatening another cleric in Najaf, Sayyed Mohammad Said Al-Hakim with unspecified punishment unless he pledged allegiance to Muqtada Sadr.
Seems like Sadr's trying to build up his power base in the traditional Iraqi manner...
Hakim is the nephew of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer Al-Hakim, who heads the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the main Shia group that opposed Iraq's former president Saddam Hussein. Abdul Hassan Al-Fajaji, an official of the London-based Al-Khoei foundation, said on Sunday evening there was no change in Najaf’s security situation, describing it as “very bad.”
It's crawling with holy men, so it's likely pretty bad...
“People are screaming, crying, talking to the men to stop that against their marja (spiritual leader) but no one listens,” he said. “That’s very dangerous for our religion if something happens.” Some Shia sources said US troops stationed on the outskirts of Najaf had entered the city to help restore order. The US military had no confirmation of the move. Fajaji said US forces were not intervening. “I asked them to protect us, but they say it is not their business,” he added.
Since we have no idea who's doing what to whom, or why, that's probably for the best...
Abed Al-Budairi, an aide to the pro-Western Khoei, said Sistani left his Najaf home before it was surrounded by men wielding knives and guns but that Sistani’s son was in the building. “This is the biggest catastrophe. Total terror reigns in Najaf,” said Dibaji. “Najaf is a main centre of learning, like Oxford in England. It has more than 1,000 years of history.”
Kinda like Oxford, only with thugs...
Senior Shia leaders have accused Jimaat-E-Sadr-Thani of orchestrating the killing of Khoei, who witnesses say was hacked to death by an angry mob outside the Imam Ali mosque days after returning from London under the protection of US forces. Budairi said he believed Sistani had been targeted because he was Iranian born and groups opposing him wanted an Iraqi as the spiritual leader in Najaf.
Yasss... Better to have an Iraqi disbursing the contributions of the faithful...
A senior Shia opposition leader in Tehran condemned the siege. “We hope that the wise clerics in Iraq manage to control those with more hardline tendencies and remind them that what is happening in Najaf does not benefit the Iraqi people,” he said.
Oh, come now. How could a few goon squads bumping holy men off harm the Iraqi people?
Lebanon’s leading Shia cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah issued a statement telling Muslims to use all means to defend Sistani from an “evil assault.”
Oh, a fatwah. That'll help.
Relatives say Khoei, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Abdul Qasim Al-Khoei and Iraq’s highest Shia religious authority in the world at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, was the victim of a power struggle for control of Najaf. His family in London on Saturday insisted his role in Najaf had been “purely humanitarian, not political.” According to relatives, all the Al-Khoei brothers, except one were killed by the Baath regime or disappeared.
Moqdada Sadr's probably looking for him now...
Confused scenarios of the circumstances of Majid Al-Khoei’s death continue to emerge. One of his companions, Abu Tarek, told the Al-Mu’tamar newspaper published by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraq National Congress in London said six people-not two-had been killed in the clashes outside of the Najaf mosque. Abu Tarek was quoted as saying those killed were three of Al-Khoei’s nephews who lived in Najaf and the man who was allegedly the real target of the violence, Haider Al-Kilidar, who had long been related to the Baath regime, according to a journalist with Al-Mu’tamar.