Word: dawa
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...Maliki, 56, is an unlikely unifier. In his previous job as spokesman for al-Jaafari's Islamic Dawa Party, he was known as a Shi'ite partisan. But he gained the trust of some Sunni politicians during last year's tortured negotiations over Iraq's constitution, when he was one of several politicians who helped cobble together a temporary compromise with Sunni and Kurdish groups...
...Maliki appears remarkably similar to the man for whom he effectively served as a spokesman for the past year. Like Jaafari, Maliki is a Shi'ite Islamist of the Dawa party who spent some of his exile in Iran (the rest was in Damascus, while Jaafari went to London); like Jaafari he owes his position to the backing of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both men have been accused of having a sectarian outlook despite their public embrace of national unity; both are Iraqi nationalists who oppose the dismembering of Iraq into semi-autonomous mini states; both would also...
...many times in his career, it's hard to know which way he's going. He has been a Communist, a Ba'athist and a liberal-secular democrat; these days, he represents the Shi'ite-fundamentalist Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which, like Jafaari's Dawa Party, is beholden to Tehran. Halfway through last year, Mahdi told TIME he was about to bolt from SCIRI and form his own party. He changed his mind-likely because he knows he has no grassroots support or street cred of his own. As prime minister, he would be little more...
...most of his life, al-Jaafari thought less about how to run a government and more about how to topple one. In the 1970s, al-Jaafari, a physician, was a rising star in the Islamic Dawa Party and fled with the leadership to Iran and then Britain in the 1980s when Saddam outlawed the movement. He speaks English well but not with the facility of a native speaker and prefers to conduct interviews through an interpreter. Since becoming Prime Minister, al-Jaafari has lived within the Green Zone in what had been one of Saddam's favorite palaces...
...Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of millions of poor Shi'ites in Sadr City in Baghdad and across the south, appears to be leaning against the constitution and his followers have demonstrated alongside Sunnis over the issue of federalism. SCIRI, Badr and Dawa all support the constitution. Significantly, they all have support from Iran while al-Sadr's relationship with Iraq's Persian neighbor has been stormy. His opposition to the constitution is more about limiting the influence of Iran rather than hard opposition to the principle of Iraqi federalism, while SCIRI and Badr are packed with Iranian sympathizers...