Word: dawa
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...There's no question the Americans have less influence than they had before. The Shi'ite parties in the negotiations - Dawa, SCIRI and Badr Organization - dug in their heels so much that President George W. Bush called SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to ask him for more flexibility. The president failed to convince the cleric. Other accounts say the Americans in the embassy gave up trying to broker deals two days before the parliament accepted the draft...
...will surely complicate things and possibly split the Sistani-backed United Iraqi Alliance. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's Dawa party, SCIRI's alliance partner, has opposed creating a Shi'ite region in the south. There is suspicion that Iran is behind Hakim's call because of fears that Iraq, under the new constitution, will have a weaker central government than it has now, meaning any Iranian influence via Baghdad will be curtailed as well. The proposal alarms the Americans, who never anticipated the emergence of an Iranian-influenced southern region. Iranian influence is widely perceived as one of the greatest...
That said, al-Jaafari is a man with a past. He leads the Islamic Dawa Party, a deeply religious Shi'ite group that spearheaded a rebellion against Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1970s. Dawa received backing from the Shi'ite regime in Iran. During the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Saddam made membership in the party punishable by death and brutally suppressed the movement. Like much of the Dawa leadership, al-Jaafari fled to Iran and then to Britain. The group's past activities are murky. Al-Jaafari was a member of Dawa's political wing when...
...returning to Iraq after the U.S. invasion, al-Jaafari has worked to shore up his secularist credentials. "He may head a Shi'ite party, but he has never sounded like a Shi'ite politician," says Ammar Zain Alabideen, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the leading Sunni political group. Dawa retains ties to the Iranian government, but al-Jaafari says that won't jaundice the way he views Washington. "The U.S. liberated Iraq from Saddam, and for that we will forever be grateful," he told TIME...
...faced with negotiating a relationship with a new government that reflects limited U.S. influence, and whose leaders enjoy historic ties with Iran. Jaafari's Dawa party, like the SCIRI, spent its exile years based largely in Iran, and while their leaders are careful to distinguish themselves from the Iranian approach to involving the clergy in politics, they nonetheless express a strong kinship with the Iranians. Even the Kurdish presidential nominee, Jalal Talabani, has historically enjoyed good relations with Tehran. While the new government in Iraq is unlikely to mimic Iran's theocracy, it is likely to assume a foreign policy...