We have glossed a lot in recent years on the “Shiite croissant” which would see the Islamic Republic of Iran rely everywhere on Shiite communities to feed its expansionism in the Middle East.
According to this geopolitics of identity, each Shiite Arabic is, because Shiite, a more or less active relay of Tehran in the region. This is to forget that the Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the most respected of the Shiite authorities, disputes with constancy, from the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq, the very principle of Iranian theocracy. And that the Shiite population, majority in Iraq, provided the bulk of the battalions that held the front against Iran during the 1980-1988 war. It took the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, so that this multisacular border collapsed between the Arab and Persian worlds.
the army of the Mahdi
The Bush administration, a prisoner of its confessional vision of the region, wanted above all to have Shiite partners in the reconfiguration of Iraq, once overthrow the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. It is the pro-Iranian activists returned from exile to Iran or Syria who formed the frame of this “new Iraq”, in the forefront of which Nouri al-Maliki, one of the editors of the 2005 Constitution.
Faced with them, the generation that had never left Iraq and had grown up under the embargo of 1991-2003 had designed a fierce nationalism, whose leader became Moqtada al-Sadr. Simple 30-year-old mullah during the American invasion, he draws his prestige from the “martyrdom” inflicted by the Baasist regime to his father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, murdered in 1999, as well as the cousin of this Ci, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Sadr, hanged in 1980. The most populous Shiite district of Baghdad, called “Saddam City” during the dictatorship, is renowned “Sadr City” after 2003, as a sign of allegiance of its inhabitants At Sayyed (descendant of the prophet Muhammad) that is Moqtada al-Sadr.
The young Shiite chef organizes his supporters in an “army of the Mahdi”, thus prevailing the twelfth and last imam of Shiism, obscured in the eyes of men for more than a millennium, whose return is supposed to mark the end of time. The symbolic challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran is coupled with a military challenge to the American occupation, which the Mahdi army faces in 2004, to the heart of the holy city of Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr is even besieged for three weeks in Ali’s mausoleum, the first imam of Shiism, and he transforms the evacuation of this holy place into political victory. In 2007, Sadr supporters chose the Mahdi anniversary day to stretch their Shiite rivals in the other holy city of Iraq, Kerbala, where the mausoleum of Hussein, son of Ali, martyred in 680 is located ( Achoura, who commemorates the killing of Hussein, is the most sacred celebration of the Shiite calendar).
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