by MADAWI AL-RASHEED
By seeking to court the leading Shia politician, the Saudi crown prince is stirring up conflict within Iraq’s Shia factions but he could be playing with fire
On 30 July Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman welcomed controversial Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
This is not Sadr’s first visit since the 2003 American occupation. He arrived in Riyadh in 2006 at the height of the Iraqi resistance to the occupation and the Iraqi civil war. But the visit was unsuccessful then. It yielded little benefits to either side. Like other aspiring clerics turned politicians, Sadr entered Iraqi politics with his own Jaysh al-Mahdi militia that later changed its name to the Peace Brigades.
Saudi Arabia grew very frustrated over the Iranian expansion in Iraq after 2003 and found itself constantly backing losing Iraqi horses. From patronising Sunni tribal chiefs in 2005 as part of al-Tawafuq electoral list to backing the Iraqi Sunni-Shia coalitions under Iyad Allawi in 2010, Saudi efforts to find an entry into post-Saddam Iraqi politics led to further frustration amounting to hostility on several occasions.
Saudi relations with Iraq deteriorated so much during Nouri al-Maliki’s premiership with Iraq bluntly accusing Saudi Arabia of sponsoring terrorism and precipitating a sectarian war in Iraq as a result of its Wahhabi ideology and the Saudi jihadis found in Iraq. Only in 2015 did a Saudi ambassador return to Iraq after almost 25 years of absence.
Sadr’s recent visit to Jeddah is a break from past Saudi practices and strategies. Mohammed bin Salman and his Trump administration backers want to limit Iranian expansion in the Arab world without outright military confrontation with Iran or its various militia that operate in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
An ally against Iran
Consequently bin Salman is building on a new strategy to lure the controversial but famous and influential Shia cleric into Riyadh’s orbit. If he decides not to boycott the 2018 Iraqi elections, Sadr and his Sadrist movement, popular among the poor of Baghdad’s Madinat al-Sadr and the south, will need all the support he can summon against his Shia rivals, for example the Dawa Party and other weaker Iraqi secularists, both appealing to the aspiring Iraqi middle classes.
Sadr’s relations with Iran have always been tense and he never enjoyed the full support of either Iranian officials or the grand ayatollahs of Qum. The first despised his Arabness and erratic politics while the latter resented his unwillingness to endorse the theory of Wilayat al-Faqih, or rule of the jurists, which is at the heart of the establishment of the Islamic republic.
Although he descends from a family of Shia religious scholars, Sadr is not an established theologian and has no high training that would allow him to become an ayatollah one day.
MEE for more