{"id":1702,"date":"2008-04-07T17:22:51","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T17:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-04-07T17:23:42","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T17:23:42","slug":"more_on_sadr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1702","title":{"rendered":"More on Sadr"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Washington Post<\/a> says:<\/p>\n

Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will disband his Mehdi Army militia if top Shi’ite clerics including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani order him to do so, a senior Sadr aide told Reuters on Monday.<\/p>\n

\nAide Hassan Zargani told Reuters that Sadr had told his representatives in both the holy Iraqi city of Najaf and also the Iranian city of Qom to ask top Shi’ite religious leaders for advice on whether to dissolve the militia.<\/p>\n

\n“If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders,” said Zargani, who was speaking from Iran. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, a few interesting things here – first, it does seem to support the notion that Sadr’s forces didn’t do so well against the central governments; next the question of Iran’s involvement – and their interests – are going to be very interesting to ponder; next it means we’ll have a bunch of armed ex-militia guys wandering around to add to the Anbar crowd of newly unemployed gunmen.<\/p>\n

In general, it seems<\/b> very positive; the goal is a national government, and this is an important step on the way toward one. But I’ll watch things closely in the next few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadr goes to ask Sistiani whether to disband his militia…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}