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United States Blamed For Assassination of Sadr Aide
NAJAF, Iraq - Followers of the renegade cleric Muqtada al Sadr chanted anti-American slogans and vowed revenge for the assassination Friday of Sadr's top aide in Najaf, where outrage over the killing threatens to spiral into the second deadly uprising in southern Iraq in a month.
Riyadh al Nouri, 41, who ran the main Sadr office in Najaf and was known as a relative moderate within the movement, was gunned down as he returned home from prayers Friday afternoon, according to Iraqi authorities and the Sadr camp. No group has claimed responsibility for the slaying, which amounted to a highly provocative strike at Sadr's inner circle. Nouri was Sadr's brother-in-law.
"Long live Sadr! Muqtada is the bridge to heaven!" mourners chanted at Najaf's sprawling cemetery. Other slogans cursed the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies. Throngs of Sadr supporters referred to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki as "the enemy of God," "infidel," "coward" and an "agent of the Americans."
"The martyrdom of Seyyed Riyadh al Nouri has burned my heart, and I will not rest until I have avenged him," said Mohamed Hassan, a Mahdi Army militiaman who drove from the town of Kufa for the funeral.
The timing of the killing - not even two weeks after more than 120 people died and at least 300 were wounded in fighting between Sadr's militiamen and government forces in the port city of Basra - raises the specter of a wider rebellion that could spread to Sadr's strongholds in Baghdad.
That scenario would only further tax the outgunned Iraqi security forces and could undo the gains of the U.S. military's widely touted troop buildup strategy.
Sadr, who's believed to be studying theology in neighboring Iran, issued a statement blaming the United States and the Iraqi government for his aide's assassination, describing his enemies as acting "traitorously and aggressively against our dear martyr." Sadr also demanded a swift investigation from the authorities and calm from his furious supporters.
"We will not forget this precious blood. I call upon Sadr followers to be patient. The occupiers will not rest in our land as long as I am alive," Sadr said in the statement.
Maliki quickly condemned the killing and said gangs were behind the attack. In a brief televised address, Maliki also mourned Nouri and included the slain Sadr aide among targeted "moderate religious personalities."
Nouri was married to one of Sadr's sisters, and one of Nouri's sisters is married to Sadr's brother, Mustafa, according to the Najaf office. Despite their close relationship, Nouri had at times challenged his militant brother-in-law and was well known for his stance against spilling the blood of Iraqi security forces and rival Shiites, as well as his opposition to the Sadr movement's decision last year to step down from posts in Maliki's administration.
Nouri was also Sadr's handpicked chief negotiator with the Iraqi government, said Abdulhadi al Mohammedawi, director of the Sadr office in nearby Karbala.
Nouri also had his detractors, who recall his arrest by U.S. troops in May 2004 in connection with the brutal killing a year earlier of another Shiite cleric, Sheik Abdul Majid al Khoei, just after the American-led invasion of Iraq. Nouri and a co-defendant were released in 2005 under an agreement to end an early Sadrist uprising that left thousands of Iraqis dead.
The Khoei killing resurfaced Friday as a possible motive in the assassination of Nouri. With no suspects in police custody by late evening, Najaf residents debated whether the killing was a covert U.S. operation to dismantle the Sadr network, or was undertaken by rival Shiite Muslim parties locked in a power struggle with Sadr, or was committed by Sunni extremists, members of the former regime or other tribal, religious and political enemies.
Nouri's death heightens the tensions engulfing the southern Shiite heartland, where Sadr's men are fighting government-allied Shiite rivals for supremacy and turf. On Friday, residents mostly ignored the curfew that the government imposed after the assassination. Motorists drove right through checkpoints, and thousands of mourners marched to fulfill Sadr's call for a fitting burial for his comrade.
The enormous, men-only funeral procession ended at the Sadr family's private plot at the Valley of Peace cemetery, where Nouri was buried according to Islamic custom. Iraqi government snipers looked on from rooftops, and few, if any, state authorities searched or blocked members of the procession. Occasionally, Sadr's supporters hurled pebbles at the state security forces or cursed and threatened them at checkpoints.
Special correspondent Qassim Zein reported from Najaf; Allam reported from Baghdad. Special correspondent Sahar Issa contributed from Baghdad.
© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers
7 Comments so far
Show AllRep. John Tierney said that the corruption in Iraq is so bad that 50% of the oil it produces is being sold on the black market with a good portion of those proceeds going to support the rogue elements in that country.
We need to get our troops out of that country and back home where they belong!
As Scooby would say, 'rghuuuh-rghooooh!'
Whether it is true or not, I am ashamed that in the current light of US guv policies and tactics, I have to consider that there is better than 50-50 chance the Sadrists are correct in their beliefs.
What better way to continue dividing the Iraqi populace than killing the moderate voices of all sides.
Curmudgeon99 - there are people on both sides who would like to see the moderates go. Peace helps the American weapons manufacturers even less than it does Sadr's cause.
RE: Riyadh al Nouri, 41, who ran the main Sadr office in Najaf and was known as a relative moderate within the movement, was gunned down as he returned home from prayers
Seems as if Nouri is worth more now as a Martyr than he was in life.
Then again, I was just listing to "Eddie" from Phantom of the Paradise on youtube, so I may be biased.
I only know what I read in the papers, and I'm nervous about speaking up for someone who is, for the moment at least, being demonized by the Bush administration, especially someone who is currently shooting back at American forces, albeit in self-defense. But I must raise the question of whether Moqtada al-Sadr might not be one of the "good guys," a strong, spiritual leader whom world opinion should now be ecumenically supporting.
Al-Sadr is apparently a wildly popular leader of the Shiite poor, who, time and again, has demonstrated his commitment to peacefully resisting the overwhelmingly-superior military forces bent upon murdering him. Aside from his courageous refusal to relinquish the ancient homelands of his followers to invaders who would steal and exploit them, and his stubborn unwillingness to be assassinated, what has he done to deserve universal media condemnation and abandonment in the west?
Because al-Sadr's charismatic leadership is seen by the west's most powerful leaders as a major barrier to their hegemony in the Middle East, few journalists seem willing to raise this question. Yet several times throughout this conflict, when it has seemed temporarily expedient for the U.S. to leave al-Sadr in peace, he has urged patience and forbearance among his followers even as the wide-scale destruction of his country by foreign occupiers has continued.
Currently, American forces are attacking al-Sadr's Mahdi army in oil-rich Basra, which is right across the border from Iran. Perhaps Mr. Cheney hopes to provoke just enough Iranian retaliation for this particular aggression to finally justify his own longed-for invasion of Iran's oil fields? Patriots in Basra and Iran share far more in common with one another than with their American attackers; surely the Iranian government cannot be expected to indefinitely contain the passions of their red-blooded youth, currently standing passively by, watching while their brother-Shiites in Basra are being slaughtered.
Isn't it time we reconsidered the unquestioned place we have given al-Sadr in our western pantheon of demonized enemies? He is a leader to whom the majority of Shiites in Iraq currently pledge their allegiance, one who has often turned the other cheek even while his beloved followers were being killed. Despite being repeatedly stalked, discredited, attacked, betrayed, and occasionally befriended by President Bush, his millions of followers trust him unreservedly to make their decisions for them. Shouldn't journalists be speaking out loudly and clearly against the attacks upon him? Who are the bad guys here, and who are the good guys?
How can we expect al-Sadr's forces to passively turn in their guns when our own country feels free to unilaterally initiate pre-emptive wars, invade, occupy and shoot up foreign country sides and villages and cities, interfere with sovereign nations' internal affairs, drop nuclear and conventional bombs on civilian populations, disrupt livelihoods and lives, kill innocents, and stockpile armaments enough to end life on earth many times over? Al-Sadr has not invaded America. The reverse has happened.
The Bible does not say "the lamb shall lie down with the lion," but "the lion shall lie down with the lamb." In other words, powerful countries must first let their weaker neighbors live in peace. Our own interests, even as citizens of the mega-powerful United States, are served only when our leaders humble themselves to offer good will to all other nations, and treat all our neighbors as we would wish to be treated. It is the traditional moral duty of the military to protect the weak from those who would hurt them, not to push the weak around in order to get whatever a highly unpopular, unresponsive and unrepresentative administration wants when they want it.
The willingness to turn to violence to resolve conflicts, whether through state (military) terrorism or through civilian terrorism, turns out to be the problem itself, and not, as many have tried to persuade us, any particular ideology, ethnicity or religion. The burning question too often overlooked in every conflict is: which side is committed to accommodation, compromise and non-violent resolution of this conflict, and which side isn't?
In the past, partisans loyally embraced only their own leaders as the "good guys," regardless of their personal records of using violence or keeping the peace--whether Bush or bin Laden, Saddam or Arafat, Hirohito or Mao or Stalin or Cheney or Eisenhower or Hitler. In the future, we will realize that the "good guys" are those real leaders, found in homes, businesses, communities, nations, and throughout the world, who are committed to resolving difficult conflicts—which are perfectly natural and human—harmoniously and peacefully. On the other hand, those violent soldiers and suicide bombers representing belligerent aggressors and extremist zealots will in the future clearly be identified as "the bad guys" of our time.
All-out war makes sense to me only when people are cornered in their own homes, fighting for survival against overwhelming odds, as al-Sadr's followers currently seem to be.
More and more people today are recognizing man's inhumanity to man—whether seen in bulldozed homes, in the shattered bodies of innocent children, or in the maimed and traumatized minds and bodies of young soldiers from every land—exactly for what it is, regardless of context, and despite all the attractive ideological, ethnic, religious, and national colors and flavors violence always comes wrapped in.
Around the world, journalists, activists and average citizens are turning away from the angry diatribes of opportunistic demagogues and ideologues bent upon stirring their fellow-citizens to torture and murder, and instead, embracing the world's highest universal values: the oneness of all mankind and the sanctity of human life.
Shouldn't we all be supporting those who are upholding these important values, and resisting the use violent solutions in the present conflict in Iraq?
(Nancy Pace blogs on breaking news at the intersection of politics, peace, spirituality and culture at www.epharmony.com.)
> That scenario would only further tax the outgunned Iraqi security forces and could undo the gains of the U.S. military's widely touted troop buildup strategy.
The authors of this article are idiots or something? Outgunned? Where did they ever get that idea? What about the fact that it was mainly Ameriscum fighting in Baghdad? What about all the bombing and strafing from the Ameriscum planes?
What gains are they talking about. Oh, I forgot, Iraq is the new Eden. Peaceful as all hell!! Hell is the operative word.
The arguement that war is capable of creating peace is being resisted, but but needs even greater voice. It is flat out impossible, always has been and always will be. This is why history is repeating itself. 'History' includes and in fact exists because as Pace notes, there have always been those who live the way of peaceful engagement in wrestling with life. The beauty of that is a strength worth studying and living. If it is through a spiritual tradition of any type, those elements of that tradition feed the soul and hence the way. Avenging a murder - though strong words is not necessarily done in violence but in rooting ever deeper the resilience of life itself.