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National Geographic : 2004 Jun
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bac. 6666 when the 6.S. fall ST o support the ig llMrlan Apart from al-Sistani, a handful of other clerics, some with their own militias, are rushing to fill Iraq's power vacuum. A few have been work ing with the Americans, like Abdulaziz al-Hakim, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council-the U.S.-appointed administrative body made up of 25 Iraqis. Al-Hakim and his brother, who was assassinated last August outside the Ali shrine in Najaf, have close ties to Iran, where they sought exile during the decades of heavy persecution by Saddam's regime. There are also younger, more extreme leaders emerging, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who called upon his followers in early April to "terrorize your enemy," leading to violence against occupation forces. "Muqtada is popular, but you have to look at Iraqi Shiites not as one large group, but many," says Saad Jabr, who heads the Free Iraqi Council, based in London. He believes that most Iraqi Shiites are too moderate to take up with al-Sadr. "Iraqis don't want to be like Iran. They are not fanatics." Recent history suggests that Iraqi Shiites' sense of national identity is too strong for them to go the way of Iran. While it's true that both countries are mostly Shiite, Iranians are predominantly Persian while most Iraqi Shiites are Arab. In fact, Iraqi Shiites fought against fellow Shiites in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Unlike the Kurds, who have desired a separate state, the Shiites have never wanted to pull away from Iraq. Many point out that their uprising in 1991 was directed at Saddam, not the Iraqi state itself. "It is an absolute nonstarter that we will fall under Iran's influence," insists Saad Jabr. "In the old days, the tribes in the south would not give their daughters to Iranians-it was considered shameful. There is a great source of pride in being Iraqi Shiites." A sense of shared Arab heritage explains why many also discount the prospect of a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. Ahmad Chalabi, the American-educated mathematician who was among those who argued for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, says a civil war simply will not happen. "Sun nis and Shiites have never fought against each other. The violence was always perpetrated by Saddam" he says from the grand Baghdad residence where his family lived until the monarchy fell in 1958. Chalabi, a secular Shiite and the president of Iraqi National Congress, returned to Baghdad as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "The future for Shiites is bright," Chalabi says, "because it is the end of discrimination, the end of exclusion. There will be full participation in the government. That is what Shiites expect and what they will get." As Iraq's Shiites struggle to forge this new future, they share a common distrust of Americans, which traces back to when the U.S. failed to sup port the 1991 uprising against Saddam, and Shiites felt severely let down. More than a decade later most Shiites I spoke to constantly reminded me of this betrayal by the U.S. Old wounds are not easily healed. "I see a potential parallel today with what happened with the British in 1920," says Yitzhak Nakash, the expert on Iraq's Shiites at Brandeis 24 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC * JUNE 2004
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