Iraq and Afghanistan

As was reported in an earlier posting, the theologian who has given a green light in the past to Muqtada was the Ayatollah al-Haeri, now resident in Qom, Iran. Apparently this is new news only to me. For the last year al-Haeri has been distancing himself from al-Sadr. He has stripped al-Sadr of his position as his representative in Iraq and announced that he did not support the idea of the Mahdi Army in the first place. This is quite important since Muqtada does not have the theological credentials for leadership in the Shi’a world and had been relying on al-Haeri to provide them. One of the reasons for al-Haeri’s change of heart was a message earlier from al-Sistani and his group telling al-Haeri that holes in the Najaf shrine roof had come from the guns of the Mahdi Army. During the Saddam years al-Haeri escaped from Iraq and published a book giving the case for armed resistance. His office no longer gives out the book, saying that since Hussein is gone the book is irrelevant. Al-Haeri remains an advocate of Iranian-style theocracy, something rejected by most mainline theologians in Iraq, but he apparently feels his objectives can now be attained through the political process.