In 2003, Muqtada al-Sadr, then a 29-year-old cleric and the fourth son Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was the bane of American forces in Iraq. After Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a prominent Shi’ite figure opposed to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and sympathetic to the United States mission, returned to Najaf on the day Saddam’s regime fell, a crowd loyal to Muqtada mobbed and hacked al-Khoei to death. With a noxious blend of populism and violence, Muqtada and his followers harried and harassed U.S. forces. Muqtada was a regular visitor to Tehran, where the United States believed he took instruction from the late Qods Force chief Qassem Soleimani. Sadr City, the eastern Baghdad slum that is home to more than one million Shi’ites, remains largely off-limits to Americans.
While Muqtada has signaled an end to his hatred of the United States, the same does not extend to Israel.
In recent years, however, Muqtada has rebranded himself. Now 51, he has distanced himself both publicly and privately from the Islamic Republic and rebranded himself as an Iraqi nationalist. While he still will not meet Americans, he authorizes his aides to do so. Having withdrawn in protest during the formation of the last government, he has also embraced his opposition role enthusiastically, criticizing rival Shi’ite leaders like former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Qais al-Khazali, the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq chief and Maliki ally who, also 51 years old, is Muqtada’s generational rival.
While Muqtada has signaled an end to his hatred of the United States, the same does not extend to Israel. In 2022, Muqtada was the primary driver of a law the Iraqi parliament passed, which made relations with Israel a capital crime. Today, if any Iraqi visits Israel or even suggests normalization with the Jewish state—as Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan all have done officially, and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Tunisia, and now Syria have done unofficially—then Iraqi law demands their death.
Herein lies the irony. As Iraq heads to elections in less than three months, the Sadrists increasingly align with Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party. It is the coalition of the remnants; the Coalition Framework, the broader Shi’ite alliance of political parties, tends to cooperate more with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the more pro-Iranian of the two Kurdish parties.
The problem for the Sadrists is that their choice of coalition partner undermines every pillar of the self-image Muqtada has so carefully crafted. Anti-corruption? Barzani’s political party is perhaps Iraq’s most corrupt and autocratic. A recent court case based on leaked banking records exposed more than 50 shell corporations, most in the Cayman Islands, that the Barzanis controlled.
Protectors of Iraqi sovereignty? The greatest violator of Iraqi sovereignty today is Turkey, whose army has established more than three dozen forward operating bases across Iraqi Kurdistan and into regions of Iraq under Iraqi government control. Turkey has also unilaterally withheld water, drying up fields across central Iraq and ruining agriculture further south as salinity from the Persian Gulf encroaches northward. To side with the Kurdish party that acts as Turkey’s quislings in exchange for cash is to make a mockery of any claim to be defenders of Iraqi sovereignty. Nor can Muqtada claim to defend Iraqi sovereignty and then ally with the only political party to try to secede from Iraq.
The real irony is that by allying with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Muqtada is also aligning with perhaps the most pro-Israel party in Iraq.
The Sadrists are wrong to castigate Israel, but decades of both Saddam-era and Iranian propaganda have taken their toll. After all, Hamas represents an ideology that despises Shi’ism almost as much as it hates Judaism. The real irony is that by allying with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Muqtada is also aligning with perhaps the most pro-Israel party in Iraq. Erbil reportedly has become as much a hub for Israeli intelligence as it is for Turkey’s clandestine service. There are likely more Barzanis who have taken secret trips to Israel than those who have not. For Muqtada to demand death to those who cooperate with the Jewish state and then turn around and embrace them for his own political convenience represents stunning hypocrisy, albeit in uniquely Iraqi style.
Muqtada’s followers represent an important constituency, one that has suffered tremendously under Saddam, American occupation, and then the post-Saddam order. Impoverished Sadrists resent the sudden affluence of so many other Iraqis and want true reform. Perhaps Muqtada calculates that lasting reform demands unpalatable compromises to achieve power, but he should be wary. Compromise comes with a cost, and Iraqi leaders always find an excuse to betray reform in pursuit of more power.
Many Iraqis and even more non-Iraqis doubt Muqtada’s evolution and the sincerity of his political evolution. By tying himself to the Barzanis, he will prove his skeptics right.
