Dread descends on Iraqi holy city

Every year, millions of pilgrims come to Najaf to pray at the Imam Ali Mosque, the tomb of the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law. It was over the question of Ali's succession that the Shiite sect emerged. Believers from across Iraq bury their dead in Najaf's cemetery, named the Valley of Peace. Aspiring clerics flock here to study at the revered hawza, a loose network of illustrious seminaries, rivaled only by Qom in Iran.

"Muqtada would covet the kind of Shiites Najaf holds," said Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Islam at Tufts University. "Sadr is popular politically, the grand ayatollahs religiously. There is a tense standoff between them. They both hold power and popularity, and that is what makes the situation so tense and volatile."

Najaf's merchant elite and clergy have long viewed Sadr as a rabble rouser, able to mobilize the Shiite slums and rural masses for violence. No one in Najaf has forgotten April 2003, when Saddam Hussein fell and Sadr emerged from house arrest to lay claim to his dead father's mantle. That month, Abdel Majid Khoei, the son of another late grand ayatollah, returned from London and was attacked by a mob inside the Imam Ali shrine, dying of his injuries near Sadr's office.

Then, in the summer of 2004, Sadr seized the shrine as part of his open revolt against the Americans. The ensuing battle battered the city's cemetery and neighborhoods. Even now, shattered buildings dot the landscape.

During that uprising, the country's preeminent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, intervened, offering Sadr's Mahdi Army safe passage from the Imam Ali shrine as a way of ending a monthlong confrontation with the U.S. military.

This time, the grand ayatollahs have declined to aid the incendiary cleric.

Three days into the Basra campaign, Grand Ayatollah Najafi issued a fatwa, or religious opinion or edict, that declared the Iraqi government as the only force in the country with the right to bear arms.

His son, Sheik Ali Najafi, left little doubt that the clergy had backed the Iraqi army operations.

"We see this as a positive improvement. . . . The people want the government to control the streets and the law to be enforced. No other groups," he said, sitting in his study, furnished with cushions, a laptop and a clock bearing his father's portrait.