IN THE PAST MONTH, Iraqi and coalition forces have succeeded in their fight against the Mahdi Army's "special groups." On May 3, the U.S. military destroyed a special groups command center in Sadr City, killing a wanted leader in the attack. On May 25, Iraqi special operations forces captured a mid-level special groups leader in the al-Shuala area of Baghdad. And on May 31, Iraqi special operations forces captured another special groups "criminal" in Baghdad who was suspected of indirect-fire attacks on coalition forces. The frequency with which the term "special groups" has been thrown around in recent months (stretching back to the fighting in Basra that flared up in late March) highlights the confusion that exists over what these groups really are.
Much of this confusion has been created by the U.S. military. In a July 2007 press conference, for example, Major General Kevin Bergner identified the special groups as secret cells of "militia extremists, funded, trained, and armed by external sources." Bergner explained during the press conference that the special groups had "evolved over the past three years into what are largely rogue elements" that operate separately from the core Mahdi Army.
Under this analysis, which has been repeated by various military spokesmen and widely accepted by the mainstream media, these special groups operate largely independently from Mahdi Army leader Moktada al-Sadr. The U.S. military maintains this narrative for tactical and political reasons. The problem with the claim is that it obscures Sadr's actual role in some of the most important
events transpiring in Iraq.
THE MAHDI ARMY, known as Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) in Arabic, was created in the summer of 2003 and is led by the radical Iraqi cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Iraq expert Toby Dodge of the University of Warwick has said that JAM's membership is comprised mainly of "those young and desperate Shia in Iraq's urban slums who have not seen any benefit to their lives from liberation." In November 2006, the Pentagon's quarterly report Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq stated that the Mahdi Army had "replaced al-Qaeda in Iraq as the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq."
The Mahdi Army's activities are often compared to those of the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon. The comparison is apt: The late Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh likely played a substantial role in the Mahdi Army's founding, and JAM members claim to have traveled to Lebanon to train with Hezbollah (an assertion confirmed by the U.S. government). In August 2007, Moktada al-Sadr publicly confirmed JAM's relationship with Hezbollah, stating: "We have formal links with Hizbollah, we do exchange ideas and discuss the situation facing Shiites in both countries . We copy Hizbollah in the way they fight and their tactics, we teach each other and we are getting better through this." Further proof of this relationship can be seen in the United States's capture of Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Hezbollah operative who was in Iraq to help establish new JAM units along the lines of Hezbollah.
Sadr himself is something of an anomaly. On the one hand, Newsweek has described him as "one of the most popular leaders in the country," uniquely dangerous because "he has the means to wage political or actual war against any solution that is not precisely to his liking." On the other hand, he is viewed as an ineloquent and uninspiring public speaker. A profile of Sadr in Cairo's Al Ahram Weekly states:
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