At least 20,000 worshippers, about twice the usual number, gathered for weekly prayers at a mosque run by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, indicating that he may be winning sympathy from more Shiites as his militia challenges U.S. authority in Baghdad as well as across central and southern Iraq.
| The more reason to see if he's impervious to rockets... |
Aided by hundreds of young seminary students, the 30-year-old cleric and his supporters have in recent days boasted of widening support after mass protests and fighting this week with U.S. and other coalition troops.
| The word for "seminary student"? Isn't that "talib"? |
"Our movement is stronger today than it was a week ago," said Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior al-Sadr aide. "But most important of all is that God is on our side," he said Friday after prayers in Sadr City, the movement's Baghdad stronghold. Al-Sadr, whose slain father was one of Iraq's top Shiite clerics, has over the past year mixed street politics, the lure of religion and the pent-up anger of a community oppressed for decades to build a base among mostly young and poor Shiites. Al-Sadr and his militia have been unpopular among most of Iraq's Shiite majority, and it's difficult to gauge the number of people who may have joined his movement since the fighting with U.S. troops began.
| So far it's been difficult to guage how many of them are Iraqis... |
U.S. troops moved with relatively little resistance into Kut, one of several cities seized by the militia, and drove the fighters out of much of it. The al-Mahdi Army uprising also has been largely quelled in the far south cities of Amarah and Basra — and is weakening in Nasiriyah, U.S. commanders said. But the movement still holds the southern city of Kufa and parts of Najaf and Karbala, southwest of Baghdad. |