Rift between Tehran and Shi’ite cleric fuels instability in Iraq

“The King of Iraq”

Sadr, now 48 years old, first rose to prominence as the son of Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a historic figure in Iraq who helped lead Shi’ite resistance to Saddam. The senior cleric, and two of his other sons, died from gunshots in a 1999 ambush widely believed to have been orchestrated by Saddam’s government. A prominent young cleric himself at the time, Sadr inherited the allegiance of many of his father’s followers.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq’s Shi’ites worked to emerge from the Sunni dominance of Saddam’s dictatorship. Sadr grew cozy with Iran. With aid from Tehran, according to former advisors and diplomats, he successfully positioned himself as a populist fighting to expel Western aggressors. Thousands of insurgents, many of whom still make up the Sadrist militia known as the Peace Brigades, saw him as their leader.

Shi’ites took power in Baghdad starting in 2005, winning a majority in the first parliamentary elections of the U.S. occupation. As Shi’ite parties consolidated their hold in subsequent elections, however, many Iraqis increasingly perceived their administrations as corrupt, focused only on controlling oil wealth and the patronage it enables.

“This political system has failed,” said Mohammed Yasser, a longtime Shi’ite activist in southern Iraq. “They have provided nothing.”

Because most of those governments were allied with Iran, Sadr gradually distanced himself from Tehran. Eager to cast his movement as incorruptible, he encouraged supporters to stage mass demonstrations, preluding those that toppled the last Shi’ite coalition in 2019. He also began currying favor with Middle Eastern governments traditionally at odds with Iran, even Sunni-led powers.

In 2017, Sadr surprised many in the region by meeting with senior officials in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf neighbors led by Sunni dynasties and allied with the United States. To overcome the historical rift between Sunni and Shi’ite regimes, Sadr played to ethnic ties instead. “We are also Arabs,” he told them, according to one senior Sadrist familiar with the visits.

Sadr made his first public critique of Iran that year, accusing Tehran in a statement of fueling sectarian conflict in Syria, Iraq and across the region. He also stepped up criticism of domestic rivals for Shi’ite influence, including former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a staunch Iran ally.

“Muqtada wants to be Shi’ite leader number one,” one former adviser told Reuters, “the king of Iraq.”

In 2020, two events tilted the landscape upon which Sadr would operate.

First, the United States in a drone strike killed Qassem Soleimani, Ghaani’s predecessor as the head of Iran’s Quds Force and a major player in Iraq. Soleimani had a strong relationship with Sadr, despite the cleric’s critiques of Tehran. Then, the UAE established diplomatic relations with Israel, solidifying a shift in some Arab states toward the West.

Those developments played into Sadr’s hands.

His outreach to Gulf neighbors, for instance, immediately led to help after the election with the task of courting Iraqi Sunnis. Iraqi officials familiar with the process told Reuters that Emirati envoys prodded Sunni parties to work toward an agreement with Sadrists. “For the Gulf countries, Sadr was the best chance to challenge Iranian power,” said Yazan Jabouri, an influential Sunni leader who attended meetings with the Emiratis.

The UAE’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Sadr had also courted the Kurds, a minority ethnic group with its own regional government in Iraq’s north. Shortly after the election, Sadrists and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the ruling group in the region, told local media they would team up in a new government. For Iran, the alliance was a double setback, particularly because the ruling Kurd party, too, has friendly relations with Israel.

By January of this year, Sadr’s alliance appeared solidified – Sunnis, Kurds and Sadrists united in a coalition they dubbed “Save the Homeland.” They elected Mohammed Halbousi, a Sunni and ally of Gulf states, as speaker of the parliament, overriding opposition from pro-Iran parties and taking the first step toward the formation of a new administration. Soon, it seemed, they would have enough votes to form a government.

Tehran at first struggled to respond, especially without Soleimani, the Iranian general killed by the U.S. His influence in Iraq dated back to the earliest days of the resistance to American occupation. Two Iranian officials familiar with discussions early this year told Reuters that Tehran asked Ghaani, Soleimani’s successor, to keep pro-Iran militias united and to seek the crucial sitdown with Sadr.

“Things were about to get really tough”

Before Sadr and Ghaani could meet, some of Iran’s allies decided to make clear their displeasure with any move away from Tehran. On February 2, a little-known Shi’ite militia based in southern Iraq launched drone strikes on Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital. The militia, known as the “True Promise Brigades,” said the strikes were in response to the UAE’s meddling in Iraq and Yemen, where a festering civil war has pitted regional proxies, led by Saudi Arabia and Iran, against one another.

The UAE said at the time that it intercepted the strikes.

But the attack spooked the Emiratis, according to an Iraqi government official, a Western diplomat and two Iraqi Sunni leaders who had worked with the UAE’s envoys in the coalition talks. The UAE sent officials to Tehran and Baghdad to quell tensions. “Their commitment to Sadr wavered,” Jabouri, the Sunni leader who participated in the efforts to form a government, said of the Emiratis.

Sadr and Ghaani met the following week.

Three days after their strained encounter, Sadr summoned aides to his home, several of his advisors told Reuters. He was visibly frustrated by the mounting tension, they said, and had even resumed smoking, an old habit he had quit and never done in public.

“He told us we weren’t just in confrontation with Iraqi rivals, but with the Islamic Republic,” said one advisor, whose account of the meeting was corroborated by two other senior Sadrists with knowledge of the meeting. “That things were about to get really tough.”

Iran got an assist from Iraq’s judiciary, controlled in large part by judges appointed by pro-Tehran parties. Days before parliament was to vote on a new president, Iraq’s Supreme Court decreed that a two-thirds majority was needed for the chamber even to meet. The ruling ruined the planned vote by “Save the Homeland,” whose simple majority was no longer enough to convene the assembly.

A flurry of other rulings by the court followed.

One barred Hoshyar Zebari, the coalition’s preferred candidate for the presidency, because of old corruption allegations. Zebari, a Kurdish politician and former finance and foreign minister, has denied any wrongdoing and hasn’t been convicted of any crime.

Another ruling slowed graft investigations that Sadrists were conducting against pro-Iran officials. A third banned the regional government in Kurdistan from dealing directly with foreign oil companies, targeting a crucial source of revenue for the important coalition partner.

Iraqi law experts and political insiders said the rulings, while legally sound, were strategically timed. “It was no coincidence,” said Sajad Jiyad, the Baghdad-based director of the Shia Politics Working Group at The Century Foundation, a U.S. think tank. “At the same time that there’s a government formation deadlock and Sadr has the upper hand, four to six rulings come out.”

Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, which oversees the country’s courts, in a statement to Reuters said the rulings weren’t political. Other Supreme Court rulings, including its ratifications of the parliamentary election results and the speaker voted upon by the coalition in January, benefited the Sadrists, it noted.

Iran’s ire then grew explicit.

On March 13, the Revolutionary Guards fired 12 missiles at the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil. Kurdish officials reported limited damage to a neighborhood outside the city center and no injuries. In a statement, the Revolutionary Guards said they launched the missiles because Israeli military operations were being conducted from Kurdistan. Tehran didn’t elaborate or provide any proof of Israeli operations.

Shi’ite Population Shi’ites account for more than 50% of the Muslim population in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, and less than 50% elsewhere in the region. Source: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life: Mapping the Global Muslim Population, October 2009.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry didn’t respond to requests from Reuters for comment.

The Kurdish government denied the accusation and saw the strikes as yet more retaliation for choosing sides among Shi’ites. “They wanted us to ally ourselves with the whole Shi’ite community, not one part against another,” said a senior Kurdish official, who was involved in talks with Iranian envoys around the time of the strikes.

Iran and its allies began pressuring Sadr’s Sunni partners, too.

In April, Maliki, the former prime minister and one of Sadr’s foremost Shi’ite rivals, helped repatriate and absolve two influential Sunnis who had fled Iraq because of terrorism charges, according to five lawyers and three government officials familiar with the effort. They told Reuters that Maliki himself helped convince a Baghdad court to drop those charges. As soon as the two Sunnis were cleared, they began denouncing the leadership of Halbousi, the Sunni parliament speaker elected by Sadrists and their allies, saying other Sunni leaders were better options.

In a television appearance, Maliki denied he had assisted the two men, but said he had asked the court about their charges and helped one of them get from the airport to an audience with the judge. Critics found his comments contradictory. Maliki’s office didn’t respond to requests from Reuters for comment about any role he played in the return of the two Sunnis.

Halbousi was rattled, according to an official close to the speaker.

Amid growing criticism about his leadership from other Sunnis, he flew to Tehran, where he sought to ensure he could still have a working relationship with Iran even if the coalition that elected him failed to form a government. “Halbousi wanted assurances that if Sadr failed, he would have support from Iran,” the official said.

A spokesperson for Halbousi said the speaker had traveled to Iran on official business at the request of the Iranian parliament. She declined to discuss the visit further.

By May, Sadr’s push to form a government stalled. No other coalition emerged to form its own government.

In June, Sadr ordered the Sadrist lawmakers to resign, ceding further control of the chamber to rivals. Sadr’s office released a statement citing the impasse, the Supreme Court rulings, and disagreements with “some countries,” without elaborating, as reasons for the withdrawal. Days later, in a video online, Sadr addressed his former legislators and urged them to reject any alliance “unless God provides an opening and the corrupt are swept aside.”

Sadrists increasingly express exasperation about their inability to form a government. Some call for renewed unrest. “This time the methods of reform will be different,” Abu Mustafa al-Hamidawi, the head of Sadr’s militia, recently told an Iraqi news site. Reuters was unable to reach al-Hamidawi for further comment.

Sadr now calls for new elections, which some believe will only delay a reckoning with political rivals.

Recently, Sadrists marched toward parliament to join colleagues there occupying the chamber to protest the impasse with other parties. Sadr’s old rival Maliki patrolled with bodyguards outside his home, brandishing an assault rifle. Pro-Iran groups staged their own demonstrations, stoking fears of armed clashes.