[THEBAGHDADPOST] When Iraq's anti-government protests began last year, it was supporters of renowned Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who added heft.They came in the thousands, manning front lines during clashes with riot police and providing security for the demonstrators as they settled in for the long haul.
Now, it might be Sadr who extinguishes their fight.
A flurry of statements from the cleric in recent months has fractured the movement, prompting accusations of betrayal. He has pulled his supporters away from protest camps and then sent those followers back to battle those who remained.
Threats made by his militiamen have sent political activists into hiding. Sadr’s followers have attacked his critics with knives.
“They’re insulting Sadr, and we can’t allow it,” cried one of his supporters, Saeed Alaa al-Yassiri, on a recent day in Baghdad’s central Tahrir Square as his group pushed other demonstrators back with sticks and knives. “They’re serving American agendas now. This square needs to be cleaned.”
Sadr is a storied figure in Iraq, with a history of agitation against U.S. troops and fierce loyalty from tens of thousands of pious and working class acolytes.
But he is also something of a shape-shifter; in the years since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the cleric has positioned himself variously as a sectarian militia leader, a revolutionary figure and a nationalist who can unify the country. His reliance on Iranian support has also waxed and waned, depending at times, it has seemed, on the optics for his political base.
But Iraq’s youth movement has emerged as a challenge to his long-standing image as a man who can command the country’s streets. As the largest spontaneous uprising in the country’s history, the protest movement has already felled one government and rejected a prime minister-designate that Sadr had backed. The candidate, Mohamed Tawfiq Allawi, stepped aside Sunday.
More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by Iraq’s security forces and Iran-backed militias since October, human rights and security officials say. The violence has turned what started as anti-corruption protests into a revolt against the entire political system, with growing anger and mockery directed at Iran’s leading role — and now at the cleric himself.
“In this sense, it is the nature of Iraq’s protest politics that has changed, not Sadr himself,” said Ben Robin-D’Cruz, a researcher on Iraqi politics at the University of Edinburgh.