Iran Heightens Stakes In Battle To Control Najaf

MARTYRDOM lies at the heart of the history of the Shias. Ever since the founder of their faith, Imam Ali, cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, was murdered with a poisoned sword in the seventh century, the Shias have believed that their route to paradise is through suffering.

That is why on holy days they cut themselves to draw blood and flog themselves with chains to bring themselves closer to the pain of the martyrs.

So when the thousands of fanatical Shia militia belonging to the Mahdi army of the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr swore to defend to the death the shrine in the city of Najaf, where Imam Ali is buried, few could doubt that they meant it.

Whether or not they will have the opportunity to take the fast route to paradise depends on the biggest decision that has so far faced Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, and his American backers.

As the battle for Najaf approaches its climax it is clear that for the Americans the stakes could not be higher. The situation in Najaf differs from that in Fallujah, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad which rebelled earlier this year. As they are now doing in Najaf, the Americans subjected Fallujah to fierce bombardment. But there was a key difference.

In Fallujah the resistance consisted of Saddam loyalists, virtually all of them Iraqi. In the end the Americans made a deal which allowed a former Baathist general and locally recruited troops to take over.

For two weeks now Najaf has been wracked by devastating attacks, some close to the Imam Ali shrine itself. By Friday, American tanks were encircling the shrine after another night of intense bombardment of enemy positions. Though the youthful Sadr was said to be willing to hand over the keys to Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, he was refusing to comply with the government’s demand to disband his Mahdi army, and vowed to fight on.

The Americans are not in the mood for compromise. The reason is that in Najaf there is a dangerous extra dimension

Sadr has the implicit, if not the overt, backing of Iran, which has moved up Washington’s list of pariah states to share the number one slot with Sudan. Ever since a group of radical students climbed into the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days, successive American administrations have been obsessed with Iran.

Despite the election of the relatively pragmatic Mohammad Khatami as president, the coterie of radical clerics remains a semi-independent power centre, with its own foreign policy.

It is Iran’s nuclear ambitions that worry Washington most. The White House knows that if Iran can acquire nuclear weapons it will become the most formidable power in the Middle East, apart from Israel. Iran says it has an "indisputable right" to nuclear technology for civilian purposes. But Washington is convinced its real goal is the acquisition of nuclear weapons, and Israel estimates Iran is only three years away from producing them.

The crisis has intensified in the past two months since Iran tore up an agreement with European countries to suspend its uranium enrichment programme. It resumed the production, and testing of uranium enrichment centrifuges that can make fissile material for nuclear reactors or weapons. Last week it tested its Shahab-3 missile, which has a range of 800 miles, enabling it to reach anywhere in the Middle East.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board is due to meet in Vienna to discuss Iran’s supposed breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty following a visit by IAEA inspectors to Iran last week.

Iran wants to co-operate with Washington for the time being, according to Dilip Hiro, author of Iraq: A Report From the Inside.

"They want to help stabilise the situation in Iraq to facilitate elections there, so the Shia majority can assume power through the ballot box, and hasten the departure of the Anglo-American occupiers," he said.

Yet Washington fears that unless the Shia insurgency in Najaf is suppressed, the Shias could break away from Baghdad, forcing the partition of Iraq and resulting in an Iranian hegemony over the Shia area of Iraq, which, most disturbingly, includes Iraq’s major oil fields and its only sea port.

Meanwhile, Allawi is veering between issuing ‘final’ warnings and offering peace to Sadr.

If either the American marines or the Iraqi security forces do storm the shrine, then the Americans and the Iraqi provisional government will be the losers.

The repercussions of what will be regarded as the desecration of one of Islam’s holiest shrines will stretch far outside Iraq, since Imam Ali is a holy figure to Sunni Muslims too.

IAN MATHER DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT