-UPDATED-
In a very dramatic (yet expected) move, the Saudi King had a royal lunch/meeting with Moqtada As-Sadr (aka Al-Sadr). As-Sadr went to Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks to take apart of the ongoing Hajj ceremonies. Neither of the two leaders announced the reason behind their small summit, but I have some predictions about it.
Let me give you a background about As-Sadr first in case you forgot about him already…
When As-Sadr supporters had their minor clashes with the US army in April 2004, Donald Rumsfeld announced to the media, based on what I remember, that the Sadr movement is a small bunch of thugs that doesn’t exceed 600 people. At that time, I blogged about the Sadr supporters and mentioned that their number is between 5 and 7 million Iraqis, 3 million of them live in As-Sadr City in Baghdad alone. Most of the supporters come from the less fortunate and very poor backgrounds.
I visited one of the offices of As-Sadr around July 2003, before they were even on the radar of the international media or occupation forces, to ask them for some more funds to support Emaar, USAID-funded NGO I was leading at that time. The branch of As-Sadr office in the southern city of Amarah was so poor that they didn’t even have doors between different rooms. In the meeting with the director, I explained to him the non-political micro-projects’ program I was trying to implement, and asked him to give funds for local projects in their city. He laughed and said “We are the ones collecting funds now! We’re collecting money to buy doors and desks for our offices”. Despite our brief meeting on the floor of the very crowded room with no doors, I still had the feeling that those people will have a big social, political, and military role in Iraq sometime soon.
I never met anyone else from the Sadr movement, but it seems that the movement spent the last couple of years, especially since the April 2004 clashes, doing a lot of social and political work around Iraq. While the occupation forces were busy bombing cities and raiding homes, the Sadr movement was doing well in “winning the hearts and minds” of Iraqis, and building their network while keeping what seems to be a very low profile.
As-Sadr took a big part in the last Iraqi elections. He agreed to join the 555 coalition, which is the main and only religious Shia coalition, after the ruling Shia parties gave him alone half of the total number of the coalition’s seats (CORRECTION: THE 30 SEATS ARE AROUND QUARTER NOT HALF). This number reflects the big demographic and political weight of his supporters. Yet, some of the supporting groups had decided to establish another independent list called “Risalyoon”, still supporting As-Sadr (UPDATE: Risalyuon got a couple of seats), but still having problem in running with Al-Hakim on the same list.
Over all, the number of parliament seats As-Sadr movement will have, from both the 555 and “Risalyoon”, will be around the same number all the Sunni coalitions will have, which is also around the same number the united Kurdish coalition will get as well.
As-Sadr is very popular and well respected among the Sunni Iraqis communities and political parties too, especially when it comes to his politics concerning the occupation.
Surprisingly enough, and after three years of the fall of Baghdad, the only person with a significant popularity among different ethnic groups is some young, poor, and low educated man like Muqtada As-Sadr. He’s turned into a national political icon in the last few years, and may be a potential national leader in the future.
Anyway, back to the Saudi King meeting…
Some months ago, I read in one of the local Iraqi newspapers (online) that the Sadr movement was collecting some thousands of signatures around the country in a campaign that aims to ask the Saudi Authorities to allow Shia to rebuild some Shia Shrines that were destroyed by Sunni fundamentalists a couple of centuries ago. I’m not sure about the details, but I think the Al-Baqi Shia Shrines in the city of Madina were brought down twice by the Wahabis, once in the mid nineteenth century, and another time in 1925.
So I would say that this was one of the hot issues during the meeting, in addition to other issues concerning Shia-Sunni and Iraqi-Arab reconciliation.
The last time that As-Sadr had a petition campaign, he collected the signatures of one million Iraqis asking that US and other Coalition troops leave the country immediately. But it seems that neither the mainstream media nor the coalition governments had noticed this big effort in showing non-violent resistant to the occupation. I hope As-Sadr will have better luck with this signatures campaign this time with the Saudi king.
