Power vacuum remains

ON his return to Iraq following Saddam Hussein’s fall from power, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim was hailed as Iraq’s version of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian Shiite leader who led his country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

His assassination further complicates the complex race for power in post-Saddam Iraq, where religious turmoil and wide discontent with the US-led occupation is becoming the norm.

Al-Hakim, 64, returned to Iraq on May 10 after spending more than two decades in exile in neighbouring Iran.

Before the allied invasion of Iraq, al-Hakim formed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the most prominent anti-Saddam groups. Al-Hakim’s group has long advocated Islamic rule for Iraq.

Many had compared al-Hakim’s return to that of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who spent 14 years in exile in Iraq before returning to lead his country’s 1979 Islamic revolution and lead its clerical regime until his death in 1989. In the days following the war, Al-Hakim’s group quickly established itself as the largest and best-organised Shiite movement in Shiite-majority Iraq.

The group set off alarm bells in Washington because of its strong links to Iran, and while al-Hakim had repeatedly rejected religious extremism, he also denounced the notion of any foreign-installed government ruling Iraq’s fractious populace.