Sadr ministers walk out of Iraq government in protest at US

The nationalist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his ministers to leave the Iraqi government on Apr. 17 because of its refusal to set a timetable for US troop withdrawal from Iraq. A violent confrontation between US forces and the Sadrist movement, popular among the Shia majority, would mark a new stage in the four-year war in which the US has hitherto been fighting the minority Sunni community. The departure of the six ministers will weaken Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who relied on the support of their movement for a majority in parliament. The Sadrists accused Maliki of "ignoring the will of the people" over the issue of a timed US withdrawal. Sadr has been hiding for two months but in recent weeks has demanded an end to the occupation. He has organized peaceful rallies attended by tens of thousands of demonstrators in Najaf at which Sadr supporters waved Iraqi flags and chanted their opposition to the continuing US presence. Menacingly for the US, Sadr called on Iraqi police and soldiers, many of them his supporters, to oppose the occupation. His new anti-US campaign is in keeping with Iraqi opinion, going by a recent poll by ABC, the BBC and USA Today. It showed that 78 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces in Iraq. More than seven out of 10 Shia–and almost all Sunni–say the US military presence makes security worse. A significant change in Iraqi politics over the past four years has been the growing hostility of the Shia towards the US. Although the Maliki government is in effect a Shia-Kurdish coalition, 59 percent of Iraqis think the US controls things in Iraq, according to the poll. Many Shia see the US as covertly manipulating the real levers of power in order to exclude them. For instance the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, the main security service, under Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, is wholly funded by the CIA at a reported cost of $3 billion since 2004. The Sadrists are not likely to move into total opposition to Maliki's government because Sadr has sought to avoid direct military confrontation with the US since his Mahdi Army militia clashed with US forces in 2004. "The prime minister has to express the will of the Iraqi people," the head of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, Nasser al-Rubaie, said on Apr. 16. "They went out in their millions asking for a timetable for withdrawal. We noticed the prime minister's response did not express the will of the people."