Al-Sadr City: Support from the impoverished

In the main square of Baghdad’s largest Shia ghetto, an elderly man in the worn uniform of the former Iraqi air force directs donkey and car traffic with a ping-pong paddle.

Al-Sadr City, once called Saddam City, has always been on the neglected margins of Iraq’s power centre and capital.

Piles of trash and long pools of raw sewage line the boulevards, while battered looking men stand on corners with shovels waiting in the hot sun for work.

Living deep in every alley are the families of martyrs from the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, from riots against Saddam Hussein and from executions on the gallows of Iraq’s prisons.

Every billboard, painting and poster advertises them - from shaikhs, Ayat Allah clerics and religious students killed by the former regime, to Ali and Hussein, the 7th-century father and son - cousin and grandson of the Messenger Muhammad - who inspired the Shia sect of Islam.

Many martyrs

But the largest portraits are reserved for the one after which al-Sadr City is named - Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a snowy bearded Ayat Allah who launched a revolutionary Shia movement here in the 1990s.

A member of al-Mahdi Army
with a rocket-propelled grenade
Posters of his son, Muqtada al-Sadr, now wanted by occupation forces, are usually plastered nearby.

The support for al-Sadr and his son runs as deep as the poverty, gruelling lifestyle and sacrifices do for the citizens…{{link http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D58B4A08-5E73-4A57-B8A3-2E478F0B6DAD.htm MORE}}

Send post as PDF to

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!