Radical clerics raise army ready to die for God

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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.