Rebel cleric rebuffs Iraqis' peace overture

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The Washington Post

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD / GETTY IMAGES Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, left, head of a peace delegation of Iraqis, is surrounded yesterday by chanting supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr.

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The eight-member delegation, led by a senior cleric who is a relative of al-Sadr, crossed a U.S. military cordon and braved nearby gunbattles to reach the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine, one of Shiite Islam's holiest sites. The group wanted al-Sadr to end a potentially destabilizing confrontation and convert his militia into a political organization that would take part in elections.

The delegates, who waited for al-Sadr for three hours, never saw him.

Al-Sadr's aides indicated the cleric is not in fact staying at the mosque, as had previously been assumed, but at an undisclosed location which he was unable to leave because of the fighting.

His aides said he failed to show because of continued aggression by U.S. forces, which have engaged in intense offensive operations against al-Sadr's militiamen in Najaf's old city, which surrounds the shrine.

	JIM MACMILLAN / AP A U.S. soldier mans a firing position yesterday in a building close to the cemetery in the besieged Iraq city of Najaf. Fighting between U.S. troops and Iraqi militants in Najaf prompted Iraq's national conference to send a peace delegation to the holy city.

Before and after the delegation's visit, U.S. Army units staged assaults to expand their zone of control in the old city, and U.S. Marines lobbed 155-mm artillery shells into the massive cemetery north of the shrine. But a senior American commander in Najaf insisted that operations paused during the attempted peace talks. "We sat still for the entire time," said Maj. David Holahan of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which commands U.S. forces in Najaf.

As the delegation arrived in the afternoon, the distinct, repetitive thud of a Bradley's 25-mm main cannon echoed through the labyrinthine alleys leading to the shrine, answered occasionally by the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade, likely fired by al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militiamen. But as the evening wore on, the sound of American armaments ceased and were replaced with more than a dozen bone-rattling booms of al-Mahdi Army mortars being fired from next to the shrine.

Although the al-Mahdi Army has been described by some U.S. military officials as a hobbled outfit that has taken hundreds of casualties in the past week, al-Sadr's militia appeared to be everywhere in the neighborhood near the shrine. Scores of armed young men walked along the streets.

When the delegation entered the walled-off, white marble courtyard of the shrine, about 1,000 of his supporters converged on the group, stamping their feet, raising their fists and shouting, "Long live Muqtada!"

	HADI MIZBAN / AP Delegates gather during a break yesterday at Iraq's National Conference in Baghdad, being held to elect a national assembly.

To al-Sadr's followers, the United States' June 28 transfer of political authority to an interim Iraqi government was meaningless. In their view, the 140,000 U.S. troops on Iraqi soil means their nation is still under occupation.

The members of the delegation are all participants in a national conference that was convened Sunday in Baghdad to select an interim national assembly. Although the assembly was to have been elected by yesterday, the proceedings have been dominated by efforts to resolve the crisis in Najaf, where U.S. forces have been in combat with the al-Mahdi Army for weeks. The conference is scheduled to meet today to hear from the delegation and to choose members of the new assembly.

Political leaders spent much of yesterday in closed-door meetings trying to persuade leaders of Shiite religious parties to back down from a demand that their members receive at least 51 of the 100 seats. While Shiites constitute a majority of Iraqis, conference organizers and leaders of parties representing Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds do not want all the Shiite members to be chosen by religious parties.

The delegation to Najaf was led by Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, an elderly Shiite cleric and distant relative of Muqtada al-Sadr. It also included a woman who is a cousin of Muqtada al-Sadr, a leader of a Shiite religious party, a member of the former U.S.-appointed Governing Council, and the brother-in-law of interim President Ghazi Yawar.

As soon as they entered the shrine, they got signals that they would not meet with al-Sadr. "If you have connections with the U.S. leader, you should call him and ask him to withdraw his forces a little bit so that we can bring Sayed Muqtada Sadr safely here," said Ali Smeisim, al-Sadr's deputy, using a religious honorific for the cleric.

Rajaa Khozai, one of the delegates, said she hoped the group would be able to return today or tomorrow to meet al-Sadr. But there were no immediate plans to do so.

One of the eight members, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting "was not as successful" as the group had hoped it would be. "Muqtada needs to make a dramatic move for peace," the member said. "We had hoped to convey that to him directly."

Washington Post correspondent Karl Vick and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki in Najaf contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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