Al-Sadr – Jaafari new alliance

Al-Sadr state­ment

After rumors of Maliki’s gov­ern­ment exe­cuted al-Sadr fol­low­ers in “Sook al-Sheiukh” [north of Basra city], burn­ing them to death, Muq­tada al-Sadr released a hand writ­ten state­ment saying:

- The dec­la­ra­tion of three days mourn­ing in all Sadr’s offices in Iraq.

- Denounce the crim­i­nals through mosques and the media for forty days.

- Pub­licly announce the issu­ing of legal pro­ce­dures against the doers [crim­i­nals], there­fore such crimes against the Iraqi peo­ple will not be repeated in the future.

- The Iraqi par­lia­ment to denounce this massacre.

Lastly we con­demn the Amer­i­can sec­re­tary of State visit, and we ask the gov­ern­ment to not allow the occu­piers ter­ror­ists to enter our sacred land.

Jaa­fari — al-sadr alliance

Accord­ing to Yaqen, for­mer PM Jaa­fari is in Qum — Iran ten days ago nego­ti­at­ing an alliance with Muqatada al-Sadr to form a new “front” [party] called ‘The National Reform Move­ment” after his nego­ti­a­tions with his for­mer party [al-Dawa] reached a dead end [in this inter­view about two months ago he said that he is very close to al-Sadr].

The source added that “Dawa” party is push­ing to remove [fire] al-jaafari from the party, many Sadrists joined al-Jaafari at the last two months, the only obsta­cle stands against this alliance is that the Sadrists con­sider al-Jaffari a per­son who in the ser­vice of the occu­pa­tion con­trary to the Sadrists ide­ol­ogy of resistance.

My take

Among the “Dawa” fol­low­ers, Jaa­fari is more respected than Maliki, but the prob­lem is that Jaa­fari is alone, his alliance with al-Sadr pro­vides him the fol­low­ers [mili­tia he needs], al-Sadr can ben­e­fit from pulling a con­sid­er­able numm­ber of “Dawa” sup­port­ers to his side.

Inter­est­ing to watch how Maliki, al-Hakim and the Amer­i­cans will work against this alliance, prob­a­bly a road-side-bomb imple­mented by “al-Qaeda” to kill Jaafari.