Ayatollah's death leaves power vacuum

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 today 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.

On his return to Iraq, al-Hakim denounced the occupation forces and demanded they withdrew from Iraq and allow the country’s people to establish their own government, which should be Islamic in nature.

“We don’t fear these (US and British) forces. This nation wants to preserve its independence and the coalition forces must leave this country,” al-Hakim said on May 12.

But Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, a brother of the ayatollah, is a member of the US backed Iraqi Governing Council, symbolising he willingness of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to work with the Americans at least for now, while more radical Shiites have shown less patience with occupation.

The Al-Hakims are one of the most influential families in the Shiite community in Iraq.

Followers of the Shiite sect of Islam, a minority in the Islamic world, are a 60% majority in Iraq and are the majority in neighbouring Iran.

Shiites had long lived under the persecution and oppression of Saddam’s Sunni Muslim-dominated regime. Al-Hakim’s return was seen by many as a forerunner to a Shiite political revival in Iraq.

As the Americans launched their assault on Saddam’s forces, Shiite leaders were also being targeted in Iraq.

In April, two prominent Shiite clerics were assassinated in Najaf. Their killings were widely perceived as part of an internal dispute among rival Shiite factions.

Last week, a relative of the ayatollah’s and one of Iraq’s most prominent Shiite clerics, Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, was injured after a gas cylinder placed alongside the wall of his Najaf home.