9.3 |
July 2004 to May 2005
532.
Since the
election the number of recorded attacks had reduced, and by the end
of
March had
fallen to below 400 a week, the lowest level since March 2004.
Attacks on the
MNF-I,
which made up 75 percent of the total, were down slightly whereas
attacks on
Iraqi
citizens had increased slightly. The weekly average number of
casualties was 300.
533.
The JIC
assessed the Shia militias as “largely dormant”. Muqtada
al-Sadr was
concentrating
on the political process but his organisation remained
“fractious” and
the risk of
some Shia violence by Sadrists and others was expected to
persist.
Foreign jihadists
remained “capable of mounting attacks with disproportionate
impact”.
534.
On 7 April,
the TNA elected its first Speaker and swore in the
Presidential
Council and
Prime Minister Designate.292
Mr Jalal
Talabani, leader of the PUK,
became President.
Mr Adel Abdul-Mahdi (Shia) and Mr Ghazi Yawer (Sunni)
were
both appointed
Vice-President. Dr Ibrahim al-Ja’afari, of the Dawa Party, was
sworn
in as Prime
Minister Designate.
The Dawa
Party, to which both Prime Minister Ja’afari and his successor Mr
Nuri al-Maliki
belonged,
is the oldest of the two Shia Islamist movements in
Iraq.293
Although
there are differing accounts of the details of the party’s
formation, it emerged
in the late
1950s and was initially dominated by a young Shia scholar, Muhammed
Baqir
as‑Sadr,
who sought to reverse the decline of Islam within Iraqi
society.294
The Dawa
Party’s ideology is based on technocratic rule within the framework
of an
Islamic
state.
After its
formation, Dawa expanded rapidly until the Ba’ath Party took power
in Iraq in
1968 and
began a crackdown on Shia political activism, resulting in the
imprisonment
and
execution of Dawa members throughout the 1970s. In 1977, despite a
government
ban, the
party organised a religious procession (the marad al-ras) which was
attacked by
police,
leading to a wave of protests in southern Iraq.
Dawa formed
a military wing in 1979 and was proscribed by Saddam Hussein’s
regime in
March 1980.
Following a failed attempt to assassinate Tariq Aziz, as-Sadr was
detained
and later
executed.
At this
time many Dawa members, including Dr Ja’afari and Mr Maliki, fled
Iraq, and
branches of
the party were established in Tehran, Damascus and
London.
After
narrowly avoiding detention, Mr Maliki left Iraq in October 1979,
settling first in Syria
and then in
Iran.295
He left
Iran for Syria in the late 1980s, when Iranian security
services
292
BBC
News, 7 April
2005, Talabani:
Iraq’s pragmatic new leader.
293
BBC
News, 17 June
2004, Who’s who
in Iraq: Daawa Party.
294
Shanahan R,
Shi’a political development in Iraq: the case of the Islamic Da’wa
Party. Third
World
Quarterly
25:
943-954
(2004).
295
Parker N
& Salman R, Notes from the Underground: The rise of Nouri
al-Maliki and the New Islamists.
World Policy
Journal 30: 63-76
(2013).
479