Brigades of Fury

December 09, 2004

The Brigades of Fury in Iraq are the vanguard of the Shiite push for civil war. It is a Shiite militia, formed in Basra, that is reportedly building forces in the southern half of Iraq, and which this week engaged in a pitched battle with Sunni forces in the so-called “triangle of death,” the nonsensically named area just south of Baghdad.

It isn’t clear who, exactly, is backing this new force, but its purpose is clearly to intimidate the Sunni heartland and to help the U.S. occupation crush the resistance to the neocons’ plans for Iraq. To me, it seems inconceivable that such a force could come into being without at least the tacit support of Ayatollah Sistani, the czar of Shiite Iraq.

Sistani is intent on imposing his will, like most would-be dictators. Hiding under the label of “quietist,”—that is, apolitical—the in fact extremely political Sistani is using his muscle to force all Shiite factions into a unified election list. That “muscle” includes his Svengali-like influence over millions of deluded, fanatical followers chanting “Allahu Akbar!” It’s scary and violent. But not only is the Bush administration unconcerned, but with the neocons pushing it, the White House has established a working alliance with the Sistani right.

Here’s Newsday on the coalition :

Representatives of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Tuesday finalized an electoral coalition that will group all the country's major Shiite political parties, most minor ones and dozens of independents on a single slate.

The coalition's broad reach will put it in a commanding position to gain a sizable percentage of the majority-Shiite vote in Iraq's election scheduled for Jan. 30 and perhaps dominate the National Assembly that will draft a permanent constitution for Iraq.

The coalition will run as the United Iraqi Alliance, though among most Iraqis it already is being referred to simply as "Sistani's list."

Newsday notes that both Muqtada Sadr, the murderous Shiite insurgent, and Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons’ Iraqi darling, will be on the list. Many of the candidates will be Khomeini-style partisans of the rule-by-clergy theory invented by Khomeini in the 1960s and implemented in Iran in 1979.

A Shiite offshoot, which had threatened not to join Sistani’s list, caved in after voicing objections to the prominence of so many clergymen, or mullahs, on the list.

The Shiite Political Council, an umbrella organization of 38 parties, was persuaded to join the coalition after announcing last week that it would withdraw to protest the preponderance of religious hard-liners on the list, said Hussein Musawi, a spokesman for the group.

At the time, Musawi complained that "all the top names on the list are turbaned men who support wilayat al faqih," the theory of governance pioneered by Iran's late leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Wilayat al faqih, roughly translated, means “the mullahs are the bosses.” And so it will be in the New Iraq.