Radical clerics raise army ready to die for God

BAGHDAD — A Shi’ite cleric in a poor Baghdad neighborhood claims to have recruited an army of more than 1,000 Iraqi volunteers who are ready to die to reach heaven.

The army doesn’t have any weapons, at least not yet, but Sheik Abbas Zubaidi said his recruits are already armed by the strength of their convictions.

“The Americans only have brute force and weaponry. We have God, the prophet and followers. And they are stronger than the Americans’ weapons,” the cleric said in an interview.

“We see heaven before us,” he said. “We are willing to sacrifice ourselves to reach heaven.”

Sheik Zubaidi’s effort is part of a larger recruitment campaign in southern Iraq and in the Shi’ite slums of Baghdad led by a young charismatic preacher named Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr.

The new force is named Mahdi’s Army — after the twelfth Shi’ite imam or saint who disappeared in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 874 and whose return is to herald a new age.

It claims that more than a million Iraqis have signed membership applications in the first week alone.

U.S. officials generally consider Sheik al-Sadr’s group a nuisance. It frequently stages demonstrations in front of U.S. bases proclaiming, “Down with America” and “No justice, no peace.”

Privately, American officials say they won’t trounce on Sheik al-Sadr and provoke his flock unless he does something violent.

The Shi’ite branch of Islam broke off from Sunnis almost immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Iraq’s Shi’ites constitute more than 60 percent of the population.

Under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni muslim, they were denied power and brutally oppressed. Many sought help and shelter from neighboring Iran, a Shi’ite-majority country and Islamic state run by clerics.

Sheik al-Sadr, a brooding, 29-year-old cleric based in the Southern Iraqi city of Najaf, opposes the U.S.-led occupation, rejects the legitimacy of the American-backed governing council and answers to Ayotallah Kazim al-Haeri, a hard-line cleric based in the Iranian religious city of Qom, and the Hawza, the main Shi’ite religious seminary in Najaf.

Sheik al-Sadr and his followers have been holding regular, peaceful demonstrations in Iraq and Najaf, denouncing the American occupation force as the enemy of God and decrying the 25-member governing council as an illegitimate “Zionist” body.

Sheik al-Sadr has vowed to create his own alternative council with the aim of eventually establishing an Islamic state.

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