Shiite Parties and Political Instability in Iraq
Juan Cole
(Department of History, University of Michigan)
The Shiite religious parties have dominated the landscape in post-Baath Iraq, especially in the country’s south. The secular middle class, once among the more vital in the Arab world, has clearly shrunk enormously and has little popular support. In contrast, parties seeking to implement Islamic law and reinforce Islamic norms of behavior have received widespread popular support, visible in both the national parliamentary elections and in provincial elections in January of 2005.
Three major religious parties or tendencies did best in the 2005 elections. These were the al-Da`wa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadr tendency. The latter suffered from a decision to sit out the elections by one of its more prominent leaders, Muqtada al-Sadr. In contrast, al-Da`wa and SCIRI actively campaigned. At the provincial level they sought seats as individual parties. At the national level, they formed part of the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of eleven Shiite parties cobbled together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the chief spiritual guide of the Shiites.
Da`wa
The first modern Shiite religious party in Iraq, which went beyond representing community interests to strategizing about a Shiite state, was
al-Da`wa. Founded around 1958, it aimed at combating Marxism and secular Arab Baathism by developing a modern Shiite ideology. Among its more important thinkers was the cleric, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980).
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a theorist of Islamic government, believed in consultative government and wanted some sort of elected parliament. He did not believe that it needed to be made up of clerics or that they should have any special political perquisites. The Da’wa Party was organized by secret cell, but this careful approach did not prevent occasional arrests of activists by the regime in the 1970s. Al-Sadr theorized not only the Islamic state but also what he thought of as the Islamic economy.
Modern Iraq is made up of Shiite Arabs in the south, Sunni Arabs in the center-north, and Kurds and Turkmen in the north. The Shiites are probably 65
percent of the population, with the Kurds and Sunni Arabs about 15 percent each. The Shiite branch of Islam developed from early tendencies that focused on devotion to the family of the prophet and a conviction that blood relatives of the Prophet Muhammad should head up Islam after his death. Shiites are a minority of only 10 percent in the wider Muslim world. But they constitute some 90 percent of Iran and
are also a majority in Iraq and Bahrain. They are probably a plurality of about 40 percent in Lebanon.
Iraqi tribes began converting to Shiite Islam late in the eighteenth century, and the conversion proceeded apace all through the nineteenth century. They remained the poorest community in the country, however, and were dominated by Sunni Arab political, landholding and commercial elites. The Shiite community remained disproportionately rural, but beginning in 1961 large numbers of Shiites began settling in a new, northeastern suburb of Baghdad founded by military dictator Abdul Karim Qasim, called “Revolution City.” This complex attracted so many rural Shiite immigrants that by the turn of the twenty-first century it comprised nearly half of Baghdad and some ten percent of the population of the entire country.
In 1977, massive Shiite demonstrations broke out, especially in the slums of East Baghdad. This populist violence shook the Baath regime, which had alienated Shiites by its aggressive secularism (it opened liquor stores in the holy city of Najaf) and by its tendency to favor the Sunni Arab minority. Then in 1978-1979, the cleric Ruhollah Khomeini led a revolution against the modernizing, secular shah of Iran, the success of which greatly alarmed the new president of Iraq as of 1979, Saddam Hussein.
Saddam cracked down on the al-Da’wa Party. He had Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr hanged in 1980, and killed many other al-Da’wa activists. He then made even belonging to the al-Da’wa Party a capital offense. Members of the party either fled abroad, to London or Tehran, or went underground and led secret lives inside Iraq. It extended its network of secret cells. Nevertheless, Saddam’s secret police often managed to penetrate those cells and to arrest, torture and kill al-Da`wa operatives. Many of the bodies found in Saddam’s mass graves in the south of the country belonged to Shiites whose al-Da`wa Party membership had been discovered.
Many al-Da’wa activists escaped to Iran. Others fled to London. Still others remained in Iraq but kept their activities secret. There appear to have been substantial al-Da’wa cells at Nasiriyah and in Basra. Some 200,000 Iraqis congregated in Iran, most of them Shiites. The al-Da`wa Party initially joined the umbrella group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in 1982, but two years later withdrew. Its lay leaders were eager to preserve al-Da`wa’s independence, no easy task in Khomeini’s Tehran of the 1980s. The clerical leaders of al-Da`wa accepted Khomeini’s theory of secular rule, and wished to place the party at his service. The lay members of the party opposed the clerics and argued for maintaining its
autonomy. The fight between the two went on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The al-Da`wa Party faction based in London was led by physicians and attorneys and so all along had a more lay cast. Among its leaders was Ibrahim Jaafari. Born in Karbala in 1947, he trained as a physician in Mosul and joined the al-Da`wa Party in the late 1960s. He faced persecution and brief bouts of
imprisonment when the Baath came to power in 1968. In 1980 he fled to Iran, and presumably was one of those lay leaders that opposed the idea of dissolving the party into Khomeinism. He lived in Tehran until 1989, when he moved to London. The London al-Da`wa cooperated with the US invasion of Iraq in spring of 2003 and was rewarded with key positions on the American-appointed Interim Governing
Council. Jaafari himself emerged on that body as an important figure, positioning him for a run for prime minister in February of 2005.
SCIRI
Iraqi expatriates who fled to Tehran when Saddam executed Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and made al-Da`wa Party membership punishable by death formed an
umbrella group in 1982, called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In 1984, it came to be headed by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the elder son of the former spiritual leader of Shiism in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim (d. 1971). Muhammad Baqir’s younger brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, devoted himself to developing a paramilitary capability for SCIRI, initially called the Badr Brigade. It grew to become the Badr Corps, with some 10,000 to 15,000 trained men under arms by the late 1990s. Many Badr Corps fighters were drilled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They slipped into Iraq to carry out attacks on Baath officials and facilities all through the 1980s and 1990s. Iraqi leaders fought fierce
controversies with one another while in exile in Tehran, and some maintain that the al-Da`wa Party in exile at one point plotted the assassination of SCIRI leader Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim.
In London from about 1992, Iraqi politician and banker Ahmad Chalabi formed a new umbrella group, the Iraqi National Congress, in Amman. Chalabi had had to escape from Jordan in 1989 because he was indicted for embezzling some $300 million from his Petra Bank. He was later convicted in absentia. Chalabi
nevertheless managed to convince the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to back him in setting up the INC, which came during its heyday to comprise 19 expatriate political parties in London. These included the Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and both secular and religious Shiite factions. For a time, both the London branch of al-Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq belonged to the INC.
In 1995, the al-Da`wa Party withdrew from the Iraqi National Congress in protest against the stance of the Kurds, who wanted Iraq to develop into a loose federation almost on a Switzerland model. The al-Da`wa Party, in contrast, desired a vigorous central government. Soon thereafter, the Kurds themselves fell to fighting one another with tribal militias in Iraqi Kurdistanm and a rebellion led by Chalabi failed. The INC was in the wilderness. When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Chalabi’s friends among the Neoconservative intellectuals (mostly American Jews from a leftist background who had become devotees of Ronald Reagan) were given key roles in the Pentagon, and they used them to promote Chalabi once more. Chalabi was able to draw the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq back into meetings of expatriate Iraqi politicians that aimed at cooperating with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. SCIRI representatives were even invited to Washington in summer, 2002, despite the criticism of al-Hakim that this provoked in Iran.
Sadrism
The third large political tendency among Iraqi Shiites in the 1990s was the Sadr II Movement. It grew up around Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a cleric related to the theorist of the al-Da`wa Party, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. He was therefore called “Sadr the Second.” In the Usuli school of Shiite Islam that predominates in Iraq and Iran, each lay believer is obliged to choose a guide from among the trained religious jurisprudents as to the practice of religious law and ritual. This guide, or Object of
Emulation, is typically a leading clergyman who has written a book of ritual practice called a “manual” (Risalah). The most popular and respected of these figures, most often the leading clergyman resident in the holy city of Najaf, can rise to become a Grand Ayatollah and the highest Object of Emulation in the Shiite world (at least outside Iran itself). This position was held by Muhsin al-Hakim until his death in 1971, when he was succeeded by Abu’l-Qasim Khu’i.
The long-lived Khu’i’s last two years of life witnessed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the US-led counter-attack that forced Baath troops back out, and a Shiite uprising in the south of the country in March and April of 1991. The Kurds rebelled in the north, as well, and 16 of Iraq’s 18 provinces threw off Baath Party rule. Although that uprising was called for by then president George H. W. Bush, he did nothing to support it, and allowed Saddam’s helicopter gunships to crush it. The terrified Baath military killed an estimated 60,000 persons in putting down the rebellion. Baath secret police made some 200 senior clergymen disappear from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
A year later, in 1992, al-Khu’i died. He was succeeded by his long-time protégé, Ali Sistani (b. 1930). Sistani had been born in Mashhad in eastern Iran, and studied in the late 1940s with the leading cleric, Husain Borujerdi. He belonged to the quietist school of Shiism, which held that clerics should not get too directly involved in governmental affairs. He rejected Khomeini’s doctrine of the “guardianship of the jurisprudent” in politics, i.e. direct clerical rule.
Sistani’s main competitor for authority from about the mid-1990s was Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Al-Sadr advertised himself as advocating a “third way” between Khomeini’s theocracy and Sistani’s quietism, though on most key issues he appears to have been closer to Khomeini, with whom he studied in the 1970s while the latter was in Najaf). Sadiq al-Sadr set up a new organization among poor Shiites in East Baghdad, Kufa, Basra, and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Although the Baath attempted to monitor all important developments in Iraqi society, it could not actually penetrate the poor Shiite neighborhoods very effectively.
Al-Sadr demonstrated that it was possible to organize Shiites even under Saddam’s nose. He urged Shiites to defy Saddam by gathering for Friday prayers in storefront mosques (the Baath dictator had not wanted large numbers of Shiites congregating anywhere). He organized informal courts and discouraged Shiites from resorting to the secular Baath courts. His teachings were imbued with a Puritanism that condemned most forms of entertainment, including Western films, and demanded veiling for all women. He forbade followers to wear clothing manufactured in the United States. At his rallies, crowds chanted “Death to Israel, Death to America.” Sadiq al-Sadr’s defiance of Saddam cost him dearly. In January of 1999, secret police came to him in Najaf and warned him to cease his anti-regime
activities. He refused, and mounted the pulpit, comparing Saddam to a medieval tyrant who oppressed Shiites. In mid-February of 1999, he was gunned down as he was driving home with his two elder sons. The Shiites living in the slums of east Baghdad, Basra, and many other southern neighborhoods came out to protest and riot, and were brutally repressed.
After the Fall of Saddam
These three major Shiite factions had been organizing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the installation of a Shiite Islamic republic in Iraq all through the 1980s and 1990s. When the Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, the Shiite religious parties were suddenly liberated to organize for a take-over of the country.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq rushed back to Iraq, with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim arriving in April and his older brother Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr coming in early May. Some 10,000 Shiites filled a stadium in Basra to welcome the latter. SCIRI’s Badr Corps likewise also came back to Iraq. Both SCIRI and Badr opened political offices in Shiite neighborhoods throughout the country. SCIRI established a powerful position in the southern port city of Basra, population 1.2 million, and used it as a base to proselytize in surrounding villages.
SCIRI was given a seat on the Interim Governing Council appointed by US civil administrator Paul Bremer in July of 2003, and generally cooperated with the US presence, although it was clearly a marriage of convenience. On August 29, 2003, guerrillas detonated a huge car bomb in Najaf as he emerged from the mosque at the shrine of Ali, killing him along with over 80 others. His younger brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then became the leader of SCIRI and took the party’s seat on the Interim Governing Council.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim attempted in late December of 2002 to enact shariah or Islamic law in Iraq with regard to personal status law (marriage, divorce, alimony, inheritance, and so forth). The Shiite religious parties had chafed under Baath secularism and were now determined to overthrow it. Al-Hakim initially got a majority on the Interim Governing Council. But secular Shiite physician Raja’ al-Khuzai, a prominent female member of the IGC, led a charge to overturn the shariah decree. She succeeded, though her victory only postponed the debate until an elected parliament could take it up.
The al-Da`wa Party also took advantage of the new freedom to organize and spread their party influence. They appear to be especially strong in Nasiriyah and Samawah. Al-Da`wa had split into several factions in the Saddam period, and were unable to recover their unity. Thus, Abdul Karim al-Unzi led a group called the Islamic al-Da`wa, whereas Jaafari continued to head up the branch of the party influenced by its London exile. Jaafari joined in the attempt to impose Islamic law in personal status matters in January-February of 2004, while he was serving on the American-appointed interim governing council. When the Americans engineered a transition to an interim government in June of 2004, Jaafari agreed to serve as one of two vice presidents in the government of secularist ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi, who became prime minister.
Unlike SCIRI and al-Da`wa, the Sadr movement for the most part refused to cooperate with the Americans. Muqtada al-Sadr, the young son of the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr, began calling for an immediate US withdrawal in April of 2003. He and his followers staged frequent demonstrations, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand, on an average of every other week, in Baghdad and elsewhere in the south.
In the summer of 2003, Muqtada began forming a formal militia. His
movement also began spreading and becoming increasingly influential outside its old base of east Baghdad, now called Sadr City in honor of Sadiq al-Sadr. Most of the Marsh Arabs, southern tribes displaced by the drying up of the swamps to slums in Amara and elsewhere in the south, appear to have gone over to Muqtada al-Sadr. By spring of 2004, The Guardian was reporting that a majority of the governing council of Maysan province, with its capital at Amara, was Sadrists. Likewise, the movement came to dominate Kut, the capital of Wasit province.
In early April, 2004, the American administration of Iraq suddenly announced that they wanted Muqtada al-Sadr “dead or alive” and attempted to arrest him.
Although he had been spreading his influence and organizing a militia, his men had seldom come into conflict with U.S. troops and it is mysterious as to why the Americans decided to come after him. They vastly underestimated him. Muqtada launched an uprising throughout the south, to demonstrate that he could not so easily be destroyed. His militiamen, the Mahdi Army, took control of most of the country, capturing police and even army outposts in Sadr City, Nasiriyah, Kut, Amara, Najaf and elsewhere in the south.
The US military found its lines of supply and communications to the south cut off, and it had lost control of the capital, Baghdad. Only two months of hard fighting forced the Mahdi Army to back down, and impelled Muqtada al-Sadr to seek a truce. Fighting broke out again in Najaf in August of 2004, over the reassertion of control over that central holy city by the Mahdi Army. The fighting devastated the old city and threatened the sacred shrine of Ali, the holiest site for Shiites (it is the tomb of the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet, whom Shiites consider the true successor of Muhammad). A stand-off at the shrine was averted by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who called for a national march of civilians on Najaf in late August. This Gandhian tactic succeeded in ending the fighting, and allowed Muqtada al-Sadr and his key lieutenants to escape. The two lessons of the US battles with the Mahdi Army were that the militiamen could be militarily defeated in hard urban combat over time, but that the US could never hope to finish them off altogether, or to win politically against Muqtada.
The three major political movements each sought sectional advantage. A spiritual figure proved the most important advocate of pan-Shiite interests. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani intervened to shape post-Saddam Iraqi politics in key ways, often coming into conflict with the Americans and always winning when he did. In late June, 2003, Sistani issued a fatwa or ruling that it would be illegitimate for the Americans to appoint a committee to draft a new Iraqi constitution, as Paul Bremer had planned to do. Sistani insisted that only an elected body could represent the will of the Iraqi people. Bremer attempted to dismiss Sistani’s intervention, but found that even his own Shiite appointees on the Interim Governing Council supported the grand ayatollah.
As the American administration of the country collapsed in the face of a growing guerrilla war in the Sunni Arab areas and continued Shiite mobilization in the south, Paul Bremer flew back to Washington in fall of 2003 to seek the beginnings of an exit strategy. He then returned to negotiate a November 15 agreement with the Interim Governing Council. It called for elections in May, 2004, after which the US would devolve sovereignty onto an Iraqi government. The electorate, however, would
not be the Iraqi public, but would be restricted to members of the provincial
Governing Councils that the US and the UK had massaged into being. The Coalition Provisional Authority had either used its own personnel or a private contractor to call small meetings of 150 local notables in each of the 18 provinces, who had selected 16 members of a provincial governing council.
Sistani immediately issued a fatwa condemning the proposed elections as completely undemocratic, and insisting on open, one-person, one-vote elections. He also insisted that the United Nations become involved in the transition to sovereignty. Sistani ultimately got his open elections, but they were postponed by the Bush
administration until January 30, 2005, rather than being held in May, 2004 as planned. This move probably reflected a fear on Bush’s part that the Iraq elections had become unpredictable and might hurt him in the U.S. presidential campaign. Until the elections could be held, UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and the Americans appointed an interim government, headed by Iyad Allawi, which took power on June 28.
The Americans and Carina Perelli, head of the UN Electoral Assistance Mission to Iraq, adopted for the country a proportional representation system based on party lists. The parliamentary election would be held throughout the country, with no local districts. The system adopted would possibly have the advantage of rewarding party lists that appealed to constituencies across the country.
The system did, however, allow for another set of strategies. Since some 65 percent of Iraqis is Shiite, Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the people around him concluded that an alternative winning strategy would be to convince most Shiites to vote for a single coalition list that grouped all major Shiite religious parties, rather than splitting their vote. His envoys succeeded in convincing both the al-Da`wa Party and the Islamic al-Da`wa to join, along with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr Corps (now the Badr Organization, with political ambitions of its own). In addition, small parties such as that of the Faili or Shiite Kurds, the Turkmen, and some secular-leaning groups like the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi joined in. The two major groups that did not join the coalition were the Sadr movement (though some 30 Sadrist independents are said to be on the UIA list), and the Iraqi National Accord of Iyad Allawi, which ran as the secularist Iraqiya Party.
In the elections of January 30, 2005, which were held for national and provincial legislatures, Sistani’s strategy was vindicated. When the proportional calculations were finally completed, using the reapportionment variation of the Hare method (which awarded wasted votes for small parties that did not meet the threshold for being seated to the larger parties that did), the electoral commission announced that the United Iraqi Alliance had 140 seats in the 275-member national assembly, or 51 percent. Allawi’s secular list received only 40 seats, or 14.5 percent. The Kurds adopted the same strategy as Sistani for their ethnic politics, putting together a Kurdish Alliance list that garnered 75 seats, or 27 percent. Few Sunni Arabs voted, which magnified the Shiite and Kurdish votes.
Not only had the religious Shiite parties swept to power but they were slightly strengthened by some small Shiite independent groups. Thus, the Cadres and Chosen Party of Sadrists gained 3 seats (they ran even though Muqtada al-Sadr had renounced involvement in the election, on the grounds that he had not forbidden it). The
Turkmen National Front also gained 3 seats. The Islamic Action Organization gained 2 seats. All three joined the United Iraqi Alliance coalition after the fact, on February 17, giving it 148 seats or nearly 54 percent. The UIA was assured that its choice for prime minister would prevail. Although it needed a partner to form a government, which requires a two-thirds majority, they would be able to legislate and set parliamentary rules virtually on their own, since those required only a simple majority.
At the provincial level, the Shiite parties ran independently from one another. In a startling development, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq won the provincial governments in 8 of the 18 provinces in the country, including Baghdad. Over-all Shiite lists won 11 of the 18. Sadrists won Wasit and Maysan, and perhaps one other. The al-Da`wa Party does not appear to have run well at the
provincial level.
The coalition chose Ibrahim Jaafari as its candidate for prime minister. As the leader of the Dawa Party, and as a figure who had long been willing to cooperate with the United States, he was someone known to be acceptable to Washington. Although he spent the years 1980 to 1989 in Tehran, he left because of increasing clerical dominance in the Dawa Party among expatriates based in Iran. He was therefore not thought overly close to the ayatollahs in Iran. In contrast, the leader of SCIRI, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had lived over 20 years in Iran and is a cleric, close to the clerics that rule Iran. The Americans, as well as non-Shiite Iraqis, would have been
uncomfortable with a “turban” as prime minister.
Another prominent figure in SCIRI was Adil Abdul Mahdi. Abdul Mahdi had been a Marxist in the 1960s in his youth, but had turned to religious politics and joined SCIRI in the 1980s. He was appointed Finance Minister in the interim
government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi from June 28, 2004, apparently because he had signaled his conversion to laissez-faire economics and privatization of Iraq’s socialist economy. Abdul Mahdi was among the more secular-leaning SCIRI
members and was rumored to be the favorite of the US for the post of prime minister among the United Iraqi Alliance figures. The details of the negotiations have not come out as yet, but it is possible that Abdul Mahdi was seen as too compliant with the Bush administration’s economic goals in Iraq, and insufficiently nationalist. He lost out to Jaafari, and became one of two vice presidents.
The American-sponsored Transitional Administrative Law required a two-thirds vote of parliament to form a government. After it was formed, however, business could be done and laws passed with a simple majority. The UIA approached the Kurds, who have 75 seats in parliament and could most easily provide the extra votes to form a government. The two sides, however, could not be more different. The major Kurdish parties want secular law and are suspicious of theocratic tendencies in SCIRI and Dawa. The Kurds want regional autonomy, whereas the Shiite parties prefer a strong federal government. The Kurds want the oil city of Kirkuk, but it is claimed by Arab and Turkmen residents, both with significant Shiite populations among them.
Negotiations on the forming of a new government dragged on throughout February and March, producing disillusionment and disappointment among many Shiites. The Sunni guerrilla insurgency started back up after the elections, and many
of the victims of its bombings and assassinations were Shiites. Shiites continued to suffer from poor security and from high crime rates.
The main announced program of the United Iraqi Council was to find a way to implement religious personal status law. Ibrahim Jaafari gave an interview with Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, in late March, in which he underlined the need for Islamic law and tradition to be enshrined in the new Iraqi constitution, which the elected parliament is charged with drafting. The Shiites parties’ emphasis on finding ways to implement Islamic law in the new constitution, and the Kurdish and American resistance to this move, bedeviled the process of constitution-making in summer of 2005.
Conclusion
The US overthrow of Saddam Hussein did not, as Washington had hoped, allow the Americans to shape post-war Iraq virtually without opposition. Initially, the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon had hoped to install Ahmad Chalabi as a soft dictator and to dictate Iraqi policy on the economy and foreign affairs. The
pre-existing Shiite parties, which had fought long years against Saddam from their Iranian and Western outposts, and which had grassroots organizations inside Iraq, were the true heirs of Iraq. Sistani used his moral authority to force the Americans to allow open elections and to allow the constitution to be crafted by the elected
assembly. He also cobbled together the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of religious Shiite parties that now dominates the new parliament. The Americans had not originally planned to install the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the al-Da`wa Party in power in Baghdad, but that is the ultimate result of their intervention. Both parties will need to compromise with the Kurds and the Americans to succeed, but the Shiite majority in Iraq finally has found its political voice.
