Basra in the grip of militias

Although the major par­ties in Basra signed a truce doc­u­ment as Al-Hayat reported today, but one Iraqi news site spot­ted inten­sive pres­ence of Mahdi Army mili­tias in key, strate­gic neigh­bor­hoods of the city which was also expected by the pre­vi­ous report of Al-Hayat saying:

The three Shi­ite Par­ties will try to exert or share con­trol on Basra, Al-Fadhila Party [Basra’s gov­er­nor is a mem­ber] to con­trol “South Oil Com­pany”, the Supreme Coun­cil imposes con­trol the secu­rity forces in par­al­lel with the pres­ence of Mahdi Army.

Iraqi writer and philoso­pher Muhanad Al-Semawi agrees with Al-Hayat, but he argues that the power share is more com­pli­cated than this, in his arti­cle “The Shi­ite Polit­i­cal Move­ments in Iraq”:

How can we clas­sify the shi­ites polit­i­cal move­ments in Iraq right now?, My aca­d­e­mic bench­marks are the following:

1– their place of exis­tence in the time of the for­mer regime.
2– Ide­ol­ogy and back­ground.
3– posi­tion from the polit­i­cal process.
4– pop­u­lar­ity among the peo­ple.
5– posi­tion from the Gas and Oil law.

In his research, the writer shows that in each bench­mark there more dif­fer­ences than sim­i­lar­i­ties among the par­ties which con­trols Basra start­ing from today, these dif­fer­ences are the wait­ing to explode in any minute in the near future.

Politi­cians are using their own clas­si­fi­ca­tion, divid­ing the mil­i­tants into two divi­sions: Abroad mil­i­tants and Inside militants.

Abroad mil­i­tants: Those who opposed the for­mer gov­ern­ment from abroad, whether from Syria, Iran, USA, London.….etc, these are [Badr Brigades, Al-Dawa party, the Supreme Council].

Inside mil­i­tants: those who stayed in Iraq and claim that they chal­lenged the for­mer regime, which in real­ity do not exists in the time of the for­mer government

.….As for the posi­tion of the polit­i­cal process, there are three dif­fer­ent positions:

1– Pos­i­tive atti­tude with the polit­i­cal process and the gov­ern­ment [Dawa Party and the Supreme Council.

2– Neg­a­tive atti­tude with the polit­i­cal process and reject it with the Amer­i­can forces occu­py­ing Iraq [Al-Khalisi order] (not a wide­spread popularity).

3– Crit­i­ciz­ing the polit­i­cal process although the accep­tance of par­tic­i­pa­tion in the par­lia­men­tary elec­tions [Al-sadr]

4– Com­plete with­drawal from the Shi­ite bloc called the United Iraqi Coali­tion, as well as their with­drawal from the Iraqi gov­ern­ment [Al-fadhila Party].

These divi­sions and clas­si­fi­ca­tions of Shi­ite polit­i­cal move­ments are not the final, and did not include all the polit­i­cal par­ties and move­ments, but these are the power Shi­ites decision-makers.