A baker's son driven by faith

Moqtada al-Sadr fills his militia with Shiite 'true believers.'

from the June 7, 2007 edition

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"When we go to Friday prayers, my father always tells me: 'If I die, you [should] stay with the Sadr movement,' " says the boy, now 16 and who, like many teenagers here, wears jeans and gels his hair.

"Even our 6-year-old son," interjects the proud father. "I told my wife to raise him to follow Sadr."

A battle framed in Islamic history

If the beliefs of this Sadrist family are any measure, Sadr has successfully transplanted a centuries-old Shiite epic about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, killed in AD 680, onto a modern war that portrays US forces as the enemies of God and Islam.

"Now we can see the [new] occupiers," he says. "They take our lands and our country, [but] we don't find any other man carrying the revolutionary spirit to the street – just Moqtada."

The seeds of those ideas first found water during the rule of Saddam Hussein, when Iraq's majority Shiites were repressed and attacked. Sadr's father, a grand ayatollah killed by the regime in 1999, was the catalyst for change.

"He started to change the ideology of these young people," says Abbas's father. "In Saddam's time, we could not say anything." But the elder Sadr's murder sparked a low-key mobilization that serves Shiite militants in Iraq today.

This father, for example, did not know that his son was secretly distributing antiregime flyers. And the son did not know that the father deliberately missed his Iranian targets while serving as an Iraqi artilleryman during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. He says he knew that his fellow Shiites on the other side of the front line were conscripts, also.

"We learned good things for the future from that era of repression," says the father. "How to lead society without a leader and organize small cells against the regime – and now the occupation."

These foot soldiers say they respect Sadr's current orders: keep a low profile until the Americans leave – or are pushed out. "We can't [yet] say 'God is great! We survived!' because we are expecting another war, says Abbas. "If the Americans make trouble for Moqtada, we will fight the occupation."

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