KUWAIT, 14 April 2003 — Armed groups have surrounded the house of Iraq’s top Shiite leader in the city of Najaf, giving him 48 hours to leave the country, aides to the leader said yesterday.
“Armed thugs and hooligans have had the house of (Grand) Ayatollah (Ali) Sistani under siege since yesterday. They have told him to either leave Iraq in 48 hours or they would attack,” Kuwait-based Ayatollah Abulqasim Dibaji told Reuters.
Abed Al-Budairi, an aide to senior leader Abdul Majid Al-Khoei, who was murdered in Najaf on Thursday, told Reuters that Sistani had left his Najaf home before it was surrounded, but his son was in the building.
“The ayatollah has been whisked away and has been taken to a secret house, but his son is in the house,” he said, adding the groups surrounding the house “have knives, weapons, guns.”
“This is the biggest catastrophe. Total terror reigns in Najaf,” said Dibaji. “Najaf is a main center of learning, like Oxford in England. It has more than 1,000 years of history.”
Dibaji said the house was surrounded by members of Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani, a splinter group led by Moqtada Sadr, the 22-year-old son of a late spiritual leader in Iraq.
“Moqtada wants to take total control of the religious sites in Iraq,” Dibaji said.
Senior Shiite leaders have blamed Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani for orchestrating Thursday’s killing of Khoei, who was hacked to death by a mob in Najaf just days after returning from exile in London to help Iraq make the transition to democracy. Another Shiite leader was also killed in that attack.
Budairi said he believed Sistani had been targeted because he was Iranian-born, and the radical groups opposed to him wanted an Iraqi as the country’s top Shiite leader.
“They went to his house and told him to leave Najaf because he is not Arab. He (Moqtada) is young, he is immature, he is against Iranian ayatollahs, and he wants the grand Maarja (top Shiite spiritual leader) to be Iraqi,” he said. He said other ayatollahs had also been told to leave Najaf.
Friends and relatives say Khoei was the victim of a power struggle among Shiite groups for control of Najaf, a city of some 500,000 people 160 km south of Baghdad.
“Khoei was very well connected and resourceful, and from a respectable family. His presence would have tilted the balance of power in Najaf. Many people felt threatened by him,” Mohammad Baqir Mohri, a Shiite scholar said.
“Moqtada and his group killed him because they want to control Najaf and the religious shrine, which will be the core of the Shiite world in free Iraq,” he added. Khoei was seen as a rising star in post-Saddam Iraq, but some criticized his close links to the United States.
Moqtada is the son of Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a Shiite Muslim spiritual leader killed along with his two other sons in 1999. Their deaths are widely blamed on the Iraqi secret service.
Meanwhile, the grand mosque of Al-Mohsen in Saddam City in Baghdad has reopened its doors not only for prayers but also to serve as a makeshift government body to bring order to this impoverished Shiite quarter.
Authorities ies shut down the mosque in 1999 when riots erupted after the assassination of Sadeq Sadr, who preached here on Fridays.
