Iraq's Mehdi Army at crossroads as U.S. scales down

By Mohammed Abbas

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Forced off Iraq's streets and with diminished political clout, what anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia do next will be crucial if they are to remain relevant.

The rallying cry of the Mehdi Army and Sadr's political movement since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 has been to kick American soldiers out of Iraq. With a 2011 deadline for a U.S. troop withdrawal possibly in sight, Sadr must find another cause to give his movement purpose and cohesion.

Sadr has largely frozen the Mehdi Army, which led two uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004, and has shifted to cultivating the cultural wing of his movement.

The cleric has huge support among Iraq's Shi'ite poor, and similar movements in the Middle East have traditionally replaced or bolstered armed struggle with cultural and charitable works that have fed into votes at the ballot box.

But the cleric has decided his movement will not compete in upcoming local elections under the Sadr banner. Sadrists will instead join independent candidate groups.

The move could be a way of keeping a hand in politics without giving legitimacy to elections held while U.S. forces are still in place.

But the move could limit their influence in increasingly powerful provincial councils, where they hold little sway after largely boycotting the last local elections in 2005, and rob them of momentum in national polls due at the end of 2009.

Sadrists took part in the previous parliamentary elections, but control only 10 percent of seats. They withdrew their six cabinet ministers from the government in 2007 in protest at Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's refusal to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Sadr's movement is unlikely to survive as a purely cultural and charitable organization with no military or political clout, said Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"They'd disappear almost overnight if they did that. It would go against every model they're copying ... If they don't run (in elections) and demobilize their militia, what's the point of them? What's the unifying ideology?" he said.

SADR SLIPPING?

Sadr spokesmen say the cleric froze his militia partly to give Baghdad and Washington space to agree a security deal, now in its final stages of negotiation, that is likely to pave the way for a large-scale U.S. troop withdrawal by the end of 2011.

"If the agreement has positive points and a defined deadline then I'm sure we will support it," chief Sadr spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi said in an interview at the cleric's headquarters in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf.

Ubaidi last month suggested the Mehdi Army would dissolve if the United States withdrew according to a defined timetable.

With violence in Iraq at four-year lows, the Pentagon will pull 8,000 soldiers out by February, leaving 138,000 troops.