June 11 (EUROPA PRESS) –
An Iraqi court has sentenced fifty extremist sympathizers of the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to one year in prison for considering the priest as a new messiah, while the faction leader has received a two-year sentence.
All those convicted are part of the so-called “People of the Cause”, one of the most radical factions of the religious supporters and in his day the country’s strong man, according to the statement of charges collected by the official Iraqi news agency NINA.
The radicals made themselves known after breaking into the great Kufa mosque, one of the most important in the country, in the province of Najaf, to declare Al Sadr as the promised Mahdi (“The Guide”), a messianic and redeeming figure of Islam and destined to appear before the end of time.
It happens that any popular statement by a Mahdi is rejected by Shiites and Sunnis. To begin with, this figure does not really appear in the Qur’an and, above all, they understand that the designation of a messiah is exclusively in the hands of God.
Salí Mohamed al Iraqi, considered to be the unofficial spokesman for Al Sadr – who had planned to go to the mosque at the time of the protest – has described the faction of the People of the Cause as a group of “corrupt” while the religious he described the irruption as the expression of an internal crisis within his own movement.
The entry into the mosque was the straw that broke the patience of Al Sadr, who then announced the withdrawal of his group from national political life. The Sadrist movement had become increasingly withdrawn in itself in recent months, particularly after Al Sadr announced in August last year his personal departure from the country’s politics amid a wave of protests from his supporters in the capital, Baghdad, which resulted in at least 35 deaths.
The bloodshed ended up culminating previous months of tension in the country, between constant Sadrist mobilizations that led to the seizure of Parliament on two occasions to protest what they denounced as constant maneuvers by the pro-Iranian formations, heavily defeated in the legislative elections, to prevent the formation of a Sadrist government.
