- "Oh, mother, why did you bring me to this unhappy
life?" is tattooed in Arabic on his arm as this veteran of Saddam
Hussein's army vows to fight to the death for wanted Iraqi Shi'ite cleric
Moqtada Sadr.
-
- The man, who refuses to give his name, is a former Iraqi
policeman.
-
- He says he arrived in Kufa on Friday with 50 other fighters
from the southern city of Nasiriyah, bringing with him only his Kalashnikov
rifle and leaving behind his wife and five children.
-
- "I leave them in God's mercy and I obey the leader's
call to drive the Jews and Americans out of the holy stepping grounds,"
said the 25-year-old man in reference to the Shi'ite Muslim holy cities
of Karbala, Kufa and Najaf.
-
- One of his companions says he has come to fight with
Sadr after hearing talk that British troops were going to join the force
of 2500 US soldiers camped outside nearby Najaf.
-
- Inside Kufa's grand mosque, where Sadr has been giving
his fiery anti-American sermons for the past three Fridays, a few dozen
armed men gather outside the command post of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.
-
- Hazem al-Mussawi, 32, shed his black turban and clerical
robes more than a month ago to fight along with his four brothers in Sadr's
militia.
-
- He has already lost one brother, Ali, in clashes with
US troops at the entrance to Kufa a week ago.
-
- Hazem, a native of Najaf, pulls out of his vest a crumpled
photograph of a smiling Ali and pictures of himself amid Lebanon's snow-covered
mountains.
-
- He says he spent with Ali "three happy months"
in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre working for a religious organisation,
during which time he met with leaders of the two main Shi'ite groups, Hezbollah
and Amal.
-
- But they rushed back to Iraq in early April when Sadr
began clashing with coalition troops in Baghdad and southern cities following
the closure of one of his newspapers and the arrest of one of his top aides.
-
- "It is really common sense, you do not need a fatwa
(religious edict) to wage jihad (holy war) when your country is being plundered,"
reasons Hazem.
-
- He says that he still respects the Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani even though the most prominent Shi'ite religious authority in
Iraq has not called for jihad against the Americans or endorsed Sadr's
militant stand.
-
- Sistani has instead called for the respect of the sanctity
of holy cities and a peaceful resolution to the Sadr standoff.
-
- A labourer who has come all the way from the northern
city of Mosul, leaving behind his wife and eight children, says Iraq has
already lost two members of the Sadr family and that he has come to protect
Moqtada with his own life.
-
- Sadr's father and great-uncle were both killed by henchmen
of ousted president Saddam Hussein for their outspoken opposition to the
secular Baathist regime.
-
- Abu Ahmed who runs the command post in the mosque says
all the men are volunteers, who are paid no stipends and bring their own
weapons and ammunition.
-
- He points to a poster on his office wall of an "Iranian
martyr" killed in recent clashes with the Americans and says that
more are on their way.
-
- A 22-year-old Iranian says he came all the way from Isfahan
eight days ago when he heard about the "opportunities for martyrdom
in Najaf province".
-
- Abu Zahra, a labourer from Karbala to the north, says
he sold some of his home furnishings and his wife's gold to come and fight
with the Mehdi Army.
-
- He says he told his pregnant wife that if she delivers
a boy, she should name him Mohammed Sadeq after Sadr's father.
-
- Sadr, who is only in his early 30s, formed the Mehdi
Army last summer after the US-led military coalition invaded Iraq.
-
- Although the militia has a few thousand regular members,
most of the new recruits are poor young Shi'ites from Baghdad's slum of
Sadr City and southern cities who are drawn to Sadr's persona.
-
- Sadr has been taking refuge in Najaf for the past month
as the US-led coalition insists he must face justice in connection with
the murder of a rival cleric last year and disband his militia.
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- http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page
/0,5744,9475826%255E1702,00.html
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