The fall of the Mahdi

LA Times:

The Mahdi Army fighter gets nervous every time he passes an Iraqi army checkpoint in Sadr City. He has even shaved his beard, a sign of his piety and his fealty to the Shiite Muslim militia, so the soldiers won't recognize him.

"I am hunted. I can't stay home. The neighbors are informing on us," 28-year-old Bassem said at a recent rally for his leader, cleric Muqtada Sadr. Using a derogatory term for the Iraqi army, he added, "Four times, the dirty division has raided my house."

At the height of Iraq's civil war, the Mahdi Army was arguably the mightiest group in the country, revered as a protector of Iraq's Shiite majority and feared for its death squads and criminal activities. The militia functioned as a state within a state, its members collecting protection fees from businesses, its fighters intimidating the Iraqi security forces that were supposed to police them.

In a telling measure of the militia's power, the U.S. military credits Sadr's decision more than a year ago to call a cease-fire as one of the chief reasons for the sharp drop in violence in Iraq.

But Sadr's fortunes have also plummeted, and his followers now contemplate a world where they are on the run and their Shiite rivals have the upper hand.

The current order in Sadr City is a bitter pill for the militia, a testament to its weakened state. Iraqi soldiers march through the street outside Sadr's headquarters in the crowded Baghdad district. Nearby, an army base fills the dirt lot where people once prayed on Friday afternoons. Deprived of the traditional spot, worshipers lay their prayer mats on the street.

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Sadr's troubles are rooted in the fighting between his militia and Iraqi security forces that erupted in March after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki ordered the army to clear the militia's strongholds in the southern city of Basra. The clashes there ended only when Sadr commanded his militia to stand down, and then did the same in Sadr City six weeks later.

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The Mahdi army was always overrated by the media and existed mainly through our forbearance and not because of its popularity with Iraqis. Many in the media have attributed the success of the surge to the Sadr call of a cease fire after the troop build up was announced. But that was a defensive cease fire, because Sadr knew he could not stand up to US troops and as it turned out he could not stand up to the Iraqi army either.