'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

L.A. Times's Daragahi got the Sistani story

The L.A. Times's talented Baghdad correspondent Borzou Daragahi wrote me to say it was not true, as I wrote here, that "no-one" in the mainstream media had gotten the story about the impact of Ayatollah Sistani's re-entry into Iraqi public politics.

He sent me the text of this story, datelined April 28, which he co-authored along with Bruce Wallace and special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf.

They wrote there:

A cleric close to Sistani acknowledged that the statement did signal a new role for the Shiite clergy, that of "monitoring" the performance of the next government and weighing in, perhaps more frequently, on broad policy issues.

"The marjaiyah intends to interfere in some issues," Sheik Abu Mohammed Baghdadi, a Najaf cleric, said in an interview. "This monitoring and direct interference is an essential matter that has never before been proposed by the clergy. The marjaiyah, through this act, is expressing the voice of the people."

Sistani's statement followed a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a conservative Shiite leader. Maliki came to Najaf to solicit Sistani's views in the midst of efforts to form a government, reinforcing a growing relationship between Shiite politicians in Baghdad and their religious counterparts in Najaf.

Sistani, the most senior of the marjaiyah, the four top Shiite clerics in Najaf, has weighed in on political matters before, notably in 2003 when he demanded that direct elections for a national government be held before a constitution was drafted.

More recently, he criticized the government for its inability to protect Shiite holy sites from a series of bombings by insurgents.

But Sistani's statement Thursday was among his bluntest and comes at a time of sensitive discussions over the selection of the Iraqi Cabinet and on the status of armed political groups.

"Now we have to go to Sistani," quipped Saleh Mutlak, a Sunni Arab lawmaker. "What kind of democracy is this?"

... In his statement, Sistani called for a government of "qualified figures, technically and administratively, who have integrity and decent reputations" without regard to "personal, party, sectarian or ethnic interests."

... [I]t was the unusually direct intervention from Sistani that rang loudest here. The cleric, who is regarded as the voice of Shiite moderation, often prefers to exercise his influence through backroom talks.

Last week, Sistani apparently nudged interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari into abandoning his quest to keep the top job in the face of opposition from Sunni Arabs, Kurds and secular politicians.

On Thursday, Maliki emerged from his meeting with Sistani to tell reporters that the cleric had "advised us, as always, to be Iraqis first."

Maliki also said his government would merge militias into the legitimate state security forces, a proposal that challenges the power of some of his own strongest backers, notably [Muqtada] Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric.

Maliki and Sadr held a news conference in Najaf on Thursday afternoon in which Sadr denounced the Rice-Rumsfeld visit, calling it "blatant interference in Iraqi affairs." The cleric repeated his call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq but dodged the question of whether he would disband his own militia, known as Al Mahdi army.

In his statement, too, Sistani derided the U.S. presence, calling for the new government to "work seriously to remove all traces of the occupier."

Daragahi and his colleagues in the Iraq bureau have been doing some great reporting recently. They seem to have an ability to gather news outside of the US-controlled Green Zone that is notably superior to that of either the WaPo or the NYT.

See, for example, this Daragahi piece from April 29, which is mainly about the inter-party contacts over forming the government.

Or this piece, datelined today, to which Daragahi and unnamed "special correspondents in Baghdad, Najaf and Ramadi" all contributed. Most of this piece is about the "Biden plan", which I'm planning to blog about next. But at the end, it noted that Sistani had held a meeting (presumably in Najaf) with some leaders from the Turkmen community in the tinder-box northern city of Kirkuk. It says,

Yalmaz Najar, leading the Turkmen group, said after the conference that Sistani had promised to defend the rights of Shiite Turkmens fighting with Kurds for political control of oil-rich Kirkuk.

A fasacinating piece of information. (Though I imagine that for clarity it should have said "fighting against Kurds"? )

Altogether, though, a significant journalistic operation there. Sorry, Borzou, that I'd failed to read that April 28 piece before I posted last week.