The Guardian’s Rory McCarthy says the Sadrists, led by the younger generation of Shia clerics, have acquired an “astonishing position of strength… with a large, armed militia and a highly organised militant political force with roots in several southern cities and in the eastern Shia slums of Baghdad.”
In Kufa, where Sadr had taken refuge and his partisans controlled the town, pilgrims and families chanted his name. (AP reports he has since left Kufa). In Sadr City, east Baghdad’s huge Shia quarter, the Financial Times Nicola Pelham saw barefoot children throwing stones at American tanks, hospitals and morgues crammed with civilian casualties, shops shuttered and residents on strike, police joining the demonstrators, and the “once supportive shanty town…a seething mass of hostility” in what Pelham suggested was the beginning of a Shia “intifada”.
Economic deprivation and chaos and the “aggressive” nationalism of the Sadrists underlie its increasing appeal to poor Iraqis, the Guardian’s McCarthy writes.
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