BAGHDAD, May 19 -- Thousands of Shiite Muslims marched peacefully through Baghdad today in the largest protest so far against the six-week-old U.S. occupation of Iraq, calling on the United States to surrender power to an elected government and denouncing the exiles and ethnic organizations that U.S. officials have courted to help form a temporary administration.

The demonstration, in its message and numbers, appeared to open a new chapter in the still-tentative relations between the U.S. occupation authority and Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim population, which was often repressed during more than three decades of Baath Party rule.

Iraqi Shiite protestors carrying political banners chant Islamic slogans at the holy shrine of Kadhamiya in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May 19, 2003. In the biggest demonstration against the U.S. presence since the war ended, thousands of Shiite Muslims marched to the Kadhamiya mosque, one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq, peacefully to protest the American occupation of Iraq and reject what they fear would be a U.S.-installed puppet government. (AP Photo/Murad Sezer)

Since the war's end, Shiite gatherings have been largely religious, involving rituals that were long banned or discouraged. But today's protest by an estimated 10,000 people took on a political tone -- a warning of what lies ahead, many protesters said, if their demands are ignored.

While divided by personalities and politics, some Shiite clerics have complained that U.S. authorities have yet to engage them over the shape of postwar Iraq. U.S. officials acknowledge that they have relied so far on Kurdish and formerly exiled anti-Baathist groups as their interlocutors, describing Shiite politics as amorphous. But they say they have not ruled out dialogue with the clergy in Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The clergy commands the respect if not the loyalty of many of Iraq's Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the country's 24 million inhabitants.

"We came here to demand that the Iraqi government be formed through agreement with the clergy," said Salem Rubai, 27, a protester. "We will keep making peaceful protest and civil disobedience until they accept our demands."

Deploying a mix of religious imagery and political slogans, the protesters marched through a sun-drenched city still reeling from the chaotic aftermath of the government's fall on April 9. Some held banners reading, "No to foreign administration," and "Islam is the desire of the masses." Others chanted, "Yes, yes to Islam" and "Yes, yes for a united Iraq."

Frustration with persistent lawlessness and intermittent electricity and water supplies across much of Baghdad formed an angry undercurrent to the protest.

The demonstration was organized by an influential Shiite faction loyal to a 30-year-old cleric, Moqtada Sadr, whose followers have employed a mix of social services, political empowerment and promises of security to fill the void left by the fall of Saddam Hussein's government. In a well-organized show of force, more than 100 of his followers sprayed water over the crowd, directed traffic and kept the demonstration along an orderly route from a Sunni Muslim neighborhood in northern Baghdad across the Tigris River to the district of Kadhimiya, home to one of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines. Some carried AK-47 rifles as they patrolled the protest.

U.S. soldiers were posted at several points along the route, but there were no confrontations.

Sadr is the scion of a family of some of Iraq's most prominent Shiite clerics. Hussein's government in 1980 executed his cousin, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir Sadr, along with his sister. Moqtada Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr, was assassinated with two of his sons in 1999 in Najaf, an attack his followers blamed on Hussein's security forces. While Moqtada Sadr was largely unknown before the government's collapse, his family's suffering has given him prestige in the turbulent arena of Shiite politics.

Protesters carried the portraits of both ayatollahs as well as pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. "Yes, yes to Islam, yes, yes to Sadr," some chanted.

Many of the divisions among Iraq's Shiites are between supporters of clergy who remained in Iraq during Hussein's rule and those who returned from exile after the government's fall. The most prominent among the exiled Shiite leaders is Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim. His group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was long supported abroad by Iran, but since his return, he has joined a group of seven opposition figures whom U.S. officials have looked to as the possible nucleus of an interim authority.

Many Shiites believe the contest between Sadr's supporters and Hakim's followers is emerging as a flash point.

Other protesters denounced Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and another key player in efforts to form an interim authority. A Jordanian court in 1992 convicted the former banker in absentia on charges of embezzlement and bank fraud and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. To many Iraqis, Chalabi is seen as aloof and too close to the U.S. government. Chalabi has contended that his prosecution in Jordan was a ploy by Hussein's government to discredit him.

"We are the people who suffered," said Hassan Zahrawi, 23, a student at Baghdad's Mustansariya University. "They are thieves. They don't know anything about the suffering of the Iraqi people."

A group of about two dozen clergy led the protest, delivering statements from atop a truck parked along the street leading to the gold-domed shrine of Imam Moussa Kadhim. Sheik Mohammed Fartousi, a leading cleric in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad renamed Sadr City, called on the protesters to pledge loyalty to Sadr and dismissed the role of opposition figures in forming a new government.

But he stopped short of openly criticizing the U.S. occupation, a sign that even the most militant of Sadr's followers have not ruled out dialogue with U.S. officials. A day earlier, he urged the U.S. government to recognize their authority.

"We will shake the hand of anyone who would like to a build a new, independent and stable Iraq," he told the crowd.

U.S. officials have said they are still waiting to see how the rivalries within the Shiite community play out. How clerics such as Sadr will deal with the U.S. occupation authority remains an unanswered question, a U.S. official said.

"It's one of the unknowns," he said. "It's almost one of the unknowables right now."

Some of the protesters gave a more blunt answer than the clergy leading the demonstration.

"This is an occupation, and we don't accept it," said Abdel-Amir Ahmed, 49. "After a week, after a month, there will be armed resistance against the Americans. This land is sacred."

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

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