SADR CITY, Iraq — Muqtada Sadr's expanding web of power starts right here, on the teeming streets of a neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad named after his assassinated father and uncle.
It begins with charities and public services, such as subsidized cooking fuel, street cleaning and soccer games for the aimless boys of the Shiite Muslim ghetto.
It extends to neighborhood watch groups and his Al Mahdi militiamen, who control and secure Sadr City as well as southern cities such as Basra, sometimes menacing rival Shiite groups, U.S.-led forces and, more recently, Sunni Arab neighborhoods.
It has spread to Iraq's parliament, where the young anti-U.S. cleric's followers control a key 35-seat bloc that has boosted interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari's political fortunes, and to provincial councils and local police forces in the Shiite south, where militiamen serve as a kind of morality police.
It stretches through key ministries such as transportation and health, which have become vast patronage troves for Sadr's followers. And it has grown beyond Iraq's borders: Sadr has spent the last few months circling the region as he rides a wave of tremendous popular support unique among any of the political movements that have emerged in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
Three years ago, the U.S. invaded Iraq at least in part, the White House says, to unleash the nation's democratic potential. By deftly employing gun and ballot alike, Sadr has used the chaos of the postwar period to spread his movement's power day by day -- and, startlingly, transform himself from obscure young rabble-rouser to hunted rebel to statesman.
Sadr's status has alarmed U.S. officials hoping to wind down the American presence and leave behind a stable government. U.S. and Iraqi officials worry that his movement, with its arsenal of weapons and radical ideology, poses a threat to any central authority and inspires other political movements to take up arms.
"The true nightmare in Iraq is not Anbar," the province that is the hotbed of the Sunni-led insurgency, "it's Basra," said a high-level U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's neighborhood by neighborhood, police station by police station, collectives of quasi-political, quasi-criminal gangs, who may use a label that has a national color to it but in reality isn't national at all.
"And it's the intermingling of criminality and the push for individual power, all blended into one."
