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Mehdi Army volatile, growing fast

By Ewen MacAskill@ guardian Newspapers Limited 2004.

BAGHDAD, APRIL 8. The black-garbed Mehdi Army leading the uprising against Coalition forces is drawn from a large and volatile pool: the slums of Baghdad. ``This is the army of the dispossessed,'' said one observer, Joost Hiltermann.

Outside the militia group, no one knows how big it is; estimates vary from 3,000 to 10,000. But it has been growing fast.

They are the poorest of the poor, the Shia who feel that, a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, there is little for them in the settlement agreed between the U.S. and the provisional Government. ``It is a class thing, not just an ethnic and religious divide,'' said Mr. Hiltermann, director of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank based in Amman which has been studying the militias.

The Mehdi Army was born in the war's aftermath. With no one in charge, Shia clerics organised food and essentials from the mosques of Sadr City, the slum in Baghdad that is home to two million Shias.

Security was just as important, and the clerics sent out gunmen to protect Sadr City. One of the most popular clerics was Moqtada al-Sadr — young, radical, and anti-American, whose father had been killed in 1999 by Mr. Hussein.

Last June, Mr. Sadr brought these irregulars together as the Mehdi Army. Mehdi is Arabic for ``the promised one'' or ``divinely guided one'', and for Shias, much more so than for Sunnis, is a figure equivalent to Christ's return on Judgment Day. One Islamic tradition speaks of fighters arriving from the east bearing black flags to slaughter unbelievers, when the Mehdi would appear.

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