NAJAF, IRAQ — A senior aide to Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr was shot dead outside his home Friday in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf, prompting suspicions that either rival Shiite parties or competing factions inside the Sadr movement were responsible.
Police immediately enforced a curfew on Najaf to try to prevent a recurrence of the Shiite-on-Shiite violence that raged from Basra to Baghdad in late March and resulted in an estimated 600 Iraqi deaths.
The assassination of Riyadh Noori, whose sister was married to Sadr's brother Murtada, raised fears of greater violence among Iraq's Shiite religious majority at a time when the United States has heralded security gains and plans troop reductions.
Police said gunmen in a car opened fire on Noori as he returned home from Friday prayers. Noori, Sadr's confidant and office manager in Najaf, was involved in negotiations last year with the Sadr movement's militia, the Mahdi Army, and its main rival, the Badr Organization militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or SIIC, the biggest Shiite party, after the armed groups clashed in Karbala.
Analysts and Sadrists refused to rule out any possibility regarding who was responsible for Noori's death.
A senior Sadr official, who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said suspects included Mahdi Army breakaway factions as well as SIIC. The official did not discount the possibility that a Mahdi Army splinter group, with ties to SIIC or Iran, was responsible. "They want to disgrace the reputation of the Mahdi Army," he said.
Sheik Fatih Kashif Ghitaa, the director of Al Thaqalayn Center for Strategic Studies, which advises the Iraqi government, said the Mahdi Army had at least four main factions: those loyal to Sadr, those funded by Iran, criminal gangs, and others who are in tacit or open cooperation with the Americans to improve their neighborhoods. He suspected the involvement of Iranian-backed or criminal elements of the Mahdi Army in Noori's death.
"It's going to be a fight among the Sadrist people themselves because three or four parts of the Mahdi Army are splintering," Ghitaa said.
Still others were ready to put the blame solely on SIIC's Badr militia wing.
"It was likely carried out by Badr corps as a powerful signal/reprisal to Muqtada," said Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. "His assassination will bring reprisals. Its significance is that this conflict may now shift from foot soldier militias shooting in the streets to assassination of leaders -- the same thing happened in Lebanon and is still happening there."
