The Role of Abdul Aziz al Hakim in the New Iraq
JONATHAN MANN, CNN HOST: The indispensable Ayatollah. Abdul Aziz al Hakim may be the most important Shiite politician in Iraq, a relative moderate who says he supports democracy and good relations with Iran and the West. What can he do about his country's chaos. Hello and welcome. From the outside, it's easy to see the chaos in Iraq and harder to keep track of the rest, the politics, the personalities and the signs, however compromised, of progress. As the country tries to take shape and maybe even changes its shape, the key figures will be a few people most of us don't really know much about. One of them is a politician with a powerful party but no public office, a Shiite cleric who favors some moderation on matters of faith, the leader of a feared militia who says the country's factions have to disarm. Whatever happens in Iraq now, the Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al Hakim is going to matter a lot. On our program today, the crucial cleric. CNN's Michael Holmes has the profile.</s>MICHAEL HOLMES, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): April 2003, southeastern Baghdad, a triumphant return for Shia powerbroker Abdul Aziz al Hakim. "In the name of God, we welcome Al Hakim," is the chant. Few knew then how powerful this man would become.</s>ABDUL AZIZ AL HAKIM, SCIRI LEADER (through translator): Of course it was very emotional for me to meet with my people after Saddam fell. I was longing to see them. My goal in this life is to serve those great people. And I am very proud to be part of it.</s>HOLMES: Al Hakim spent years in exile in Iran, became part of the Iranian-formed Badr Brigades, created to fight Saddam Hussein. Today, he heads its political wing, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI. He is also widely regarded as perhaps the most powerful man in Iraqi politics. SCIRI has seats in parliament but power well beyond that. Hugely popular among the majority Shiites, al Hakim stands at its head. Here, ministers meet with him at his office, not theirs, even the prime minister. Al Hakim holds no formal political office, but he gets plenty of respect from those who do. Here, meeting with the U.S. ambassador with whom he can converse in Farsi, the language of Iran. And look to the right of your screen. An Iraqi policeman salutes the head of SCIRI. He has his own television station, religious broadcasts mainly, but comment too on the day's religious and social developments. As for his country's surging sectarian and insurgent violence, while not civil war, he said, it could easily get out of hand.</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): I do not consider it a civil war, but it could lead to a large conflict between Ba'athists, their coalition with extremist Muslims, and the ordinary people. They could be able to conduct major crimes against Iraqis or maybe the Iraqi people could eliminate these groups. No one can expect what would happen then.</s>HOLMES: Being so respected and powerful among his people and others makes him a target for the other side. He is always heavily guarded both physically and with the words he chooses. An ardent opponent of foreign troops in Iraq, he says the United States can't leave now. What's happened, he says, has happened.</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): Considering the policy the U.S. adopted from the start, when they disbanded the Iraqi military, any sudden withdrawal could now lead to chaos and confusion in Iraq and a victory for the terrorists.</s>HOLMES: Knowing how carefully he chooses his words, his thoughts on Iran are important. He continues to deny his party is supported and Shia militias funded in part by Iran, asking for the U.S. and others to come up with hard evidence of their claims to the contrary. Last month, the Iranian ambassador called on the United States to exit Iraq and leave reconstruction of security forces to Iran and Iran, no doubt raising eyebrows in Washington. Significant perhaps, then, that Abdul Aziz al Hakim would publicly say it's not such a bad idea and perhaps security should be a regional issue.</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): Of course, we do not want to solve one problem and create another one. But we are asking whether they can help us or not. But how? This needs to be discussed. We might need a more regional security system that all countries can participate in.</s>HOLMES: Getting to al Hakim, the man, getting behind the political and religious face, is difficult. He sleeps little, works late into the night. Relaxation, we're told, is rare. But when he puts down the paperwork and religious tomes, he swims and spends time with his grandchildren. He says democracy is working in Iraq, despite the violence, the daily body count. He blames most of that on the same people the United States does, Saddamists, Ba'athists and al Qaeda, an organization that killed his own brother in 2002.</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): They play an active role. They have been welcomed by the Ba'ath Party and Saddam's loyalists. They are the real enemy for the Iraqi people and they will be in the future if they stay.</s>HOLMES: The credibility of the Iraqi government is obviously key here. He supports the prime minister, Nuri al Maliki, and that support is crucial for al Maliki's own job security. It's a government that, despite its public pronouncements about improvements, is struggling with the issue of security. But Abdul Aziz al Hakim accentuates the positive.</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): The Iraqi government now, I can say it might be the strongest government in the Middle East, considering the millions of people who went out in exodus. What happened in Iraq is like a miracle.</s>HOLMES: Michael Holmes, CNN, Baghdad.</s>MANN: A miracle, perhaps, but one way to sum up Iraq's problems is to simply make a list of all the terrorist organizations, death squads, militias and armed factions that are operating there. Ayatollah Hakim has the Badr Brigades, a widely feared Shia army that its opponents say has infiltrated Iraq's interior ministry, its intelligence operations and security forces. Michael Holmes talked with Hakim about his armed followers and about the others.</s>HOLMES: Can militias be disarmed? Should they be disarmed?</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): The issue here is not disarming people. The real problem here is that we should all admit that there is a feeling amongst Iraqis that they are not safe and not secure. This is why there are certain groups of people who feel that the government, or even the Americans, are incapable of providing them protection, and this is why they are keeping weapons with them. Whether it's legal or illegal, they only want to protect themselves. We believe that weapons should be in the hands of the government only and that no one should have weapons except the government. Weapons should be used according to the law, and this was also mentioned in the constitution. That's why we have to change the Badr Brigade to the Badr Organization, and they have not carried out any military activities since the time of the fall of the previous regime.</s>HOLMES: But the reality is that now those militias are carrying guns. We saw Badr Brigade people at the front with weapons. The Mahdi Army is certainly well armed. The pressure coming from the West to disarm, were the government to move against the militias in the very near future, what would happen?</s>AL HAKIM (through translator): There are different kinds of militias and we must differentiate between them all. There were militias who fought against Saddam's regime, like Kurdish militia, Badr Militia, Dawa Militia, Islamic Party Militia and others. There are some other kinds of militias who were formed in their areas to defend themselves, either in Shiite or Sunni areas, and those should be under control and they should coordinate their work with the Iraqi police stations. The other militias are the enemy of the Iraqi people and they are Saddamists and</s>MANN: We take a break now. When we come back, can Hakim hold his country together? Or will he help split it apart? Stay with us.</s>MANN: Iraqi authorities counted more than 1,500 violent deaths in August in just the city of Baghdad alone. That's essentially the same as July, before the start of a widely publicized security crackdown. Ayatollah Hakim has his own plan to end the violence. Broadly speaking, he would divide Iraq along ethnic lines. Welcome back. The mechanics of it may be complicated, but the concept is simple, really. The Kurds are already essentially autonomous in the north of the country. The Shiites would take the south and the Sunnis would get the west. Some people are even talking about splitting Baghdad down the middle. Would the Hakim cure be worse than the chaos? We got in touch with John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org to talk about the ayatollah as part of the problem in Iraq, or part of the solution.</s>JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: I think that that goes to the real complexity of the situation in Iraq, that he's part of the problem in the sense that his Badr Brigades have infiltrated the security services, that they are counterattacking against the Ba'athist underground, against the insurgency. He's also part of the solution because, you know, I mean, it's a dangerous country. Anybody who thinks that they can walk around in Iraq without a gun hasn't been paying much attention. So I think he's both part of the problem and part of the solution.</s>MANN: Now, when you try to explain a figure like that to people who have never been to Iraq, I guess one comparison that comes to mind is Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, and Hezbollah, both a political movement and a militia movement, guided by a politician/cleric. A good comparison?</s>PIKE: I think that that is a good comparison, because both organizations were founded in the early 1980s with the assistance of and inspired by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both Shia formations and both have had similar histories of both political development and of armed struggle.</s>MANN: Is Hakim trusted by the Sunnis and Kurds of Iraq? Is he a figure they an work with?</s>PIKE: Well, he's a figure that some of them can work with, but I think that when particularly the Sunni leadership looks at his proposal for splitting Iraq up, they think that that's a formula for disaster, because as must be apparent by now, there's oil in Kurdistan, there is oil in Shiastan, but there is no oil in Sunnistan. The Sunnis look at his proposal for dividing the country and think that they are going to get the short end of the stick, which is probably about right.</s>MANN: Why do you think he's proposing it? Is it simply an oil grab or is it really an earnest attempt to address the violence?</s>PIKE: Well, I think we're going to find out, I'm afraid. I think what he says, and has been saying very publicly recently, is never again, that the Shia were oppressed for decades when Iraq was a united country and he basically wants to create the sort of secure enclave for the Shia that the Kurds have had in the north for over a decade now.</s>MANN: Could it happen?</s>PIKE: You might wind up there, but the problem is that if you look at a map of Iraq, you don't have to be looking at a very big map before you realize that it's not a nice, neat package of Shiastan, Sunnistan and Kurdistan, but rather there is this vast area in the middle where you have Shia and Sunni living together, or Sunni and Arab and Kurds living together. You even have them intermarried. And so you are basically looking at a formula for the sort of ethnic cleansing that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia a decade ago. The difference being that in Iraq, there is something worth fighting about, oil, and there is a very real probability that the neighbors are going to get dragged in and you're going to see regional war involving Saudi Arabia and Iran going against each other.</s>MANN: Now, while you're talking about that, it brings us back to something you passed over quickly, which is the Badr Brigades and the rest of the militia. Hakim says the militias in the country should disarm, that the government should have the only weapons in Iraq. It makes sense. It hasn't happened. Is there any prospect of it happening? Is there any prospect that he will make his own people disarm?</s>PIKE: It's not going to happen anytime soon, because basically you're asking somebody to be the first one to put their gun down. Today Iraq is the NRA's dream. Basically everybody has an assault rifle. The only disarmament we've seen is confiscating heavy weapons, but it's been understood that you just can't live in that country without your own personal assault rifle.</s>MANN: Now, Hakim in all of this is not in elected office. We saw in Michael Holmes's report, though, that elected officials literally kowtow to him. Why is that? What is the hold that he has on them? What is the hold? I mean, is it strictly the fact that he has so many men under arms?</s>PIKE: No. It's the fact that he comes from a prominent family in the Shia community that has been part of the Shia establishment in Iraq for many decades. He presides over a very large network of clerics, of funeral parlor directors, and so he basically has a very powerful social and cultural network of influence competing with Muqtada al Sadr's similar network. And so he is a force to be reckoned with independent of any political office that he may or may not hold.</s>MANN: This is amazing, giving that he was in exile and essentially his operation was illegal in Iraq until just a few short years ago.</s>PIKE: Well, SCIRI was in exile. He was in exile. But much of his family, much of his social network, was in Iraq, suffered persecution under Saddam Hussein, and I think that that clearly is driving his interest, his stated interest, at least, in developing a secure enclave for the Shia, where the Sunnis can't get at them the way they did under Saddam.</s>MANN: One last question for you, and it brings us full circle. We did this program, Michael Holmes did that profile, because it occurs to us that Hakim really is the man to watch. Are we overstating it?</s>PIKE: He's certainly one of a very small handful of people that are going to be very influential in what happens in Iraq over the weeks and months ahead, and if Iraq is plunged into a civil war, ethnic cleansing, you'd certainly have to conclude that he has his fingerprints on that. We hope it doesn't go that route.</s>MANN: John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org, thank you so much for talking with us.</s>PIKE: Thank you, Jonathan.</s>MANN: We take another break. When we come back, Iraq's other Shia leaders. Who holds the real power in that troubled country? Stay with us.</s>MANN: Shiites in Iraq revere the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani as their spiritual leader. He helped unite Shiite factions into the coalition that's known as the United Alliance. It dominates the Iraqi parliament and government. But even with their common allegiance, the Shia leadership doesn't see eye to eye. Welcome back. Maybe it's no surprise that the Shia are hardly one monolithic block. Their divisions are in fact so acute that Grand Ayatollah Sistani has, in a sense, given up on them. He says he's withdrawing from any involvement in politics out of what his aides say is anger and disappointment that Shias are ignoring his call for calm. Wednesday, Mahmoud al Mashhadani, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, told his colleagues they have three to four months to set aside their differences. If the country doesn't get through that time, he said, and this is his phrase, the boat will sink. We spoke to Peter Khalil, an analyst at the Eurasia Group and the former director of national security policy at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. We started off comparing the political situation to the shaky security on the ground.</s>PETER KHALIL, EURASIA GROUP: I had a chance to speak to Jawad al Bolani, the interior minister, before he actually took up his post, and he was very reluctant to take up that post, and that's with good reason, because I think he understood that he and the prime minister, Nuri Kamel al Maliki, had really very limited power and ability to actually move against what I think is the core of the problem, and that is the infiltration of the Shiite militia into police and interior forces and the sectarian violence, which they're involved in. Of course, if they try to move against, for example, Hakim and the Badr Brigade or even Sadr and the Mahdi Army, they'll lose much of their support. Their political support and the foundations for this government and this cabinet comes from Sadr, comes from Hakim, and to a lesser extent from Sistani, who, as you said earlier, is starting to withdraw from the political process.</s>MANN: Let me jump in on that very note. How much of a signal is it that Sistani says he's withdrawing. Is it a fit of pique? Is he just a histrionic figure? When all of this began, he was regarded as the man who really held the key to making the new Iraqi work.</s>KHALIL: No, he has been, of course, one of the most powerful political figures in Iraq for the last three years, but his influence has been fading, particularly for this year. For two of those years, for example, Sistani regularly called on Shiite civilians not to retaliate to the provocations of the Sunni insurgency, the bombings and the suicide bombings against Shiite civilians, and he was largely listened to by the vast majority of the Shia population. That hasn't happened this year. I think the real turning point was the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samara, and that was really the straw that broke the camels back, as far as the Shia are concerned. You've seen a lot of sectarian violence and retaliation against Sunnis spiral out of control over the last six months.</s>MANN: The hierarchy is not as clear as it would be, say, in a military organization or any kind of institution, but if we regard Sistani as probably the most important figure in Shia culture and Shia politics in Iraq, and he moves out of the way, does that make Hakim more important? Does it fall to him now to really try and hold things together?</s>KHALIL: Others have said that Sadr becomes more important, too, and I think politically Muqtada al Sadr has become very important over the last six months. Of course, if you remember, it was his pressure on the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite caucus, that basically prevented Abdul al Lamanti (ph), who is Hakim's second in charge, if you like, from assuming the role of prime minister at the start of the year, and it's Sadr's 30 parliamentarians and his four ministers in the cabinet which are basically propping up the Maliki government at the moment.</s>MANN: I'm going to jump in because I'm terribly afraid that we're losing people in all of this, and so I'm going to propose something very, very simple, and probably too simplistic, so correct me if I'm wrong. We could have seen Sistani at the very top of the pyramid. Hakim, because of his political party and his sway, a little bit lower down. And Muqtada al Sadr as a much more, if not a marginal figure, a less important figure. And what we're seeing is Muqtada al Sadr getting a kind of influence that really is disproportionate to where the normal hierarchy of events would have put him. Is that fair?</s>KHALIL: In the religious sense, definitely. He's seen as a bit of an upstart in the sort of religious hierarchy, especially, but politically and as far as the popularity that he garners within the Shiite community, particularly in eastern Baghdad and different parts of the south, amongst the dispossessed and poor Shiite, that influence is enormous, and his political power has grown has his constituency has grown and his appeal to that populist tenancy amongst the Shiite for removal of foreign occupation troops and so on.</s>MANN: Now, as we're having this conversation it's illustrative that we're not talking about people in their capacity as members of the government. Iraq has a prime minister, Nuri al Maliki. In theory, he should be in charge. Is the government not that relevant, really, to what's going ahead? Is al Maliki just a prisoner of the currents, the events that are beyond his control?</s>KHALIL: Well, I do think so, absolutely, Jonathan. The real power behind the throne, if you like, those powerbrokers such as Hakim and Sadr and Sistani to a lesser extent now as his influence just draws down. But certainly Maliki has limited room for maneuverability, limited room for putting in and implementing policies that can make a change. Of course, as I said earlier, if he tries to move against the Shiite militia, he risks his government collapsing, because Sadr and possibly Hakim could withdrawn their support.</s>MANN: It was a Sunni, the speaker of the parliament, who threatened that there may only be three or four months, or a few months left, to save the country, and he said it in a different context, so I don't want to quote him out of context. But when you look at the calendar, is time really running out for these people?</s>KHALIL: Yes, because in the next couple of months, the Maliki government and the Iraqi political leadership has to reach consensus on a number of divisive issues, the final formal shape of the federal structure, as you discuss in your earlier story, the final status of Kirkuk also looms over the horizon, that oil-rich city, and that is in relation to the Kurds wanting to bring that under their autonomous control. There is the de- Ba'athification policy. And of course the ongoing sectarian and insurgent violence. So any of these issues could have the potential to really collapse this Maliki government, something that the United States is desperate to avoid, particularly before the mid-term Congressional elections.</s>MANN: The United States and the people of Iraq, after all. Peter Khalil, of the Eurasia Group, thanks so much for this.</s>KHALIL: Thank you, Jon.</s>MANN: And just a final note about Shia leadership and the quest for security. Iraq has a new commander in chief. Thursday, coalition forces began to transfer control of the Iraqi armed forces to the Iraqi government. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki now directly oversees Iraq's own Navy and Air Force and one of its 10 Army divisions. The United States says more divisions will fall under Mr. Maliki's control in the coming months, leaving the Pentagon free to potentially draw down its own forces in the future. At least that's the plan. That's INSIGHT. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com