Iraqi Ayatollah Issues Fatwa Against Al-Sadr’s Militia
By Ned Parker, Raheem Salman and Saad Fakhrildeen
Every year, millions of pilgrims come to Najaf to pray at the Imam Ali Mosque, 
the tomb of the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law. It was over the question of Ali’s succession that the Shiite sect emerged. Believers from across Iraq bury their dead in Najaf’s cemetery, named the Valley of Peace. Aspiring clerics flock here to study at the revered hawza, a loose network of illustrious seminaries, rivaled only by Qom in Iran.
Then in the summer of 2004, Sadr seized the shrine as part of his open revolt against the Americans. The ensuing battle battered the city’s cemetery and neighborhoods. Even now, shattered buildings dot the landscape.
During that uprising, the country’s preeminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, intervened, offering Sadr’s Mahdi Army safe passage from the Imam Ali shrine as a way of ending a monthlong confrontation with the U.S. military.
This time, the grand ayatollahs have declined to aid the incendiary cleric.
Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious opinion or edict, that declared the Iraqi government as the only force in the country with the right to bear arms.
His son, Sheik Ali Najafi, left little doubt that the clergy had backed the Iraqi army operations.
“We see this as a positive improvement. . . . The people want the government to control the streets and the law to be enforced. No other groups,” he said, sitting in his study, furnished with cushions, a laptop and a clock bearing his father’s portrait.
Their stance is a gamble. An influential cleric who is knowledgeable about talks between the Sadr movement and the grand ayatollahs described the situation in bleak terms: The government is weak, and Sadr aides now acknowledge privately that they have lost control of members who are receiving support from Iran.
“There are groups in the Mahdi Army who are kidnapping, killing and stealing. They don’t listen to Muqtada. They are openly operating with Iranian interests,” he said.
