Myths of Iraq 101

By Ken Silverstein

Pick up the newspaper any day and chances are you'll see a story out of Iraq denouncing Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a leading bad guy and blaming him for death squad savagery in the country. Just yesterday, an AP story noted two past uprisings by Sadr's Mahdi Army militia against U.S. forces, and said American troops were currently seeking to capture his senior associates. A day earlier, a Washington Times story (“Troop surge starting to show success”) said that a U.S. Stryker battalion and an Iraqi battalion had been deployed in a Baghdad area where Shiite death squads “have been forcing Sunni families out of their homes and replacing them with followers of Muqtada al-Sadr's radical militia.”

There's no doubt that Sadr is heavily involved in sectarian violence, but one gets the impression from reading such accounts that if the cleric and the Mahdi Army were taken out of the equation, sectarian violence in Iraq would fade away. That's wrong because–and here's what is all but ignored in press accounts–militias tied to the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a dominant political force in the country, are major factors in the violence as well. “SCIRI is not a moderate group,” Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group recently told me. “It's completely sectarian and just as bad as Sadr's organization. The difference is that SCIRI's militias have been incorporated into government security forces. The violence [they commit] is institutionalized.”

There's another difference between Sadr and SCIRI. Despite tensions, the latter works with the United States, and its leader, Abdul-Aziz Al-Hakim, was received at the White House last December. And the media, following the administration's lead, regularly covers Sadr's role in Iraq's sectarian violence, while largely ignoring the abuses committed by SCIRI.