Iraqi cleric’s aide slain

SF tells us about the man who was killed: he’s a senior official and a relative by marriage of Sadr and he was killed coming home from Friday prayer by gunmen who then ran off. (How high up is he in the Sadr ring? Why was he killed?) Sadr’s movement is opaque and Sadr does not favor keeping any official around him too long. So it’s hard to say exactly where and when this man was in the hierarchy. (Sadr has many enemies and those who resent his rise to power, but please delineate who his enemies might be.) Sadr represents a strain in Iraq’s Shiite majority, he has a simple nationalist line that he pushes and pushes. He has many rivals, some of whom are inside Iraq, some who left. Ultimately this is about power between Sunnis and Shiites and also within the Shiite community. (How much do you see this murder as affecting the dynamic of free elections and jockeying for power?) The line put out by the Sadrists, not that it’s necessarily true, is that everything that’s happening now is being done by the central government to weaken the Sadrists. There are many Iraqis who welcome the government’s decision to go into Basra and break up the Sadr militia. The Sadrists say you’re not going after militias, that’s an excuse to crush the Sadrists.