BAGHDAD — New leaders are springing up in the latest spasm of violence in Iraq, trumpeting grass-roots support but few or no ties to the U.S.-led coalition forces controlling the nation.
These latest players include an association of Sunni clerics, “the Prince of the Marshes” from southern Iraq and an outspoken Shi’ite female dentist.
The rise of the new figures is largely at the expense of politicians with links to the U.S.-led provisional authority in Iraq. Their arrival comes as Iraqi leaders are wrangling over who will make up a government that is to take power from coalition administrators June 30.
On that day, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council — a 25-member body that has served as an interim government since July, but failed to win the trust of many Iraqis — likely will be dissolved.
U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who was asked to come up with a plan for the transition, has proposed the council be replaced by a caretaker government of “men and women known for their honesty, integrity and competence.”
Mr. Brahimi did not say who he had in mind.
But many Iraqis are starting to see those qualifications in the rising stars: the Islamic Clerics Committee — a Sunni group — and Shi’ite Governing Council members Abdul-Karim al-Mohammedawi and Salama al-Khufaji.
Vehemently anti-occupation, the Sunni committee was formed a year ago but had been sidelined by the newly powerful Shi’ite clergy. For months the committee struggled to give a voice to Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, demoralized by the loss of its position of power under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.
The current upsurge of violence boosted the committee’s fortunes and influence.
The Sunni clerics have used their leverage to win release of some 20 foreign hostages snatched in a wave of abductions that accompanied this month’s violence.
Images of the smiling clerics embracing freed hostages have been beamed daily by Arab satellite-TV stations widely seen in Iraq, and the releases have won thanks from foreign embassies.
The committee says it has no contacts with the abductors, arguing that its “patriotic” anti-occupation stance persuades kidnappers to heed their appeal for release of captives not directly involved in military operations.
The clerics’ group has won the regard of residents of Fallujah, a hotbed of anti-American violence. It organized aid convoys into the city, and its main mosque in Baghdad became a refuge for residents who flee.
The committee has been sharply critical of the Marine siege of Fallujah and what it calls a high death toll among civilians there.
“In the course of a year, we took Iraq by storm and won the trust of everyone,” spokesman Mohammed Bashar al-Faidhi said in an interview. “The Americans have sidelined us because we don’t accept that their presence here is legitimate. This stance gave us leverage in the street because people began to sense that we speak what is on their minds.”
Iraqis dubbed Mr. al-Mohammedawi the “Prince of the Marshes” for leading a resistance movement against Saddam in the southern marsh region of Iraq for 17 years. He was imprisoned for six years under Saddam’s regime.
Mr. al-Mohammedawi, 45, bearded and often seen wearing a traditional Arab robe, suspended his membership in the Governing Council this month to protest U.S. policies in Iraq. He also played a key role in efforts to mediate an end to the standoff between U.S. forces and Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, the upstart cleric whose militia has clashed with U.S. and other coalition troops this month.
Mr. al-Mohammedawi’s Hezbollah — unrelated to the guerrilla group of the same name in Lebanon — was founded in 1994 and cooperated with U.S. and British troops in the closing stages of the invasion of Iraq last year.
But his frustration with U.S. policies appears to be pushing him away from the coalition.
“I will not go back to the council until we enter a constructive discussion about Iraq … to achieve what the Iraqi people really want and to stop the bleeding in all Iraq,” Mr. al-Mohammedawi said. “I call on everybody to use the voice of wisdom and avoid violence.”
Mrs. al-Khufaji, a Shi’ite professor of dentistry at Baghdad University, is another rising star on the Iraqi political scene. She joined the Governing Council in December, replacing another Shi’ite woman who was assassinated three months earlier.
Her conservative dress — a black chador covers her body except for her face — makes her an exception among professional women in Iraq, most of whom wear headscarves or no traditional Islamic covering at all.
She said in an interview that she objected to military solutions to the standoff with Sheik al-Sadr or the fighting in Fallujah.
“Muqtada al-Sadr has a large following and many supporters on the streets,” she said. “The Americans’ insistence on his arrest came as a surprise to many Iraqis, since they are not used to seeing this happening to icons of their society.”
An Iraqi investigative judge issued an arrest warrant for Sheik al-Sadr in connection with charges of theft and the murder last year of a rival cleric in the holy city of Najaf.
“These two have taken positions that set them apart from the rest of the council members,” Amer al-Husseini, one of Sheik al-Sadr’s chief representatives in Baghdad, said of Mr. al-Mohammedawi and Mrs. al-Khufaji.
This amounts to high praise from a senior official in a violent movement that brands Governing Council members traitors and rejects their decisions as illegal.
“Salama al-Khufaji’s shoe is of more value than the entire council,” another al-Sadr aide, Nasser al-Saadi, told a 20,000-strong congregation on April 9.
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