Armed men have surrounded the house of a top Shi'ite Muslim cleric in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, ordering him to leave the country within 48 hours, aides to the cleric told Reuters on Sunday.
Shi'ite sources said U.S. troops stationed on the outskirts of Najaf had moved into the city to restore order amid a struggle between rival Shi'ite groups for control of the historical heart of their religious community.
"Armed thugs and hooligans have had the house of (Grand) Ayatollah (Ali) Sistani under siege since yesterday. They have told him to either leave Iraq in 48 hours or they would attack," Kuwait-based Ayatollah Abulqasim Dibaji told Reuters.
Dibaji said the house was surrounded by members of Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani, a shadowy group led by Moqtada Sadr, the ambitious 22-year-old son of a late spiritual leader in Iraq.
"Moqtada wants to take total control of the holy sites in Iraq," Dibaji said.
Shi'ites form a 60 percent majority in Iraq but have long suffered discrimination at the hands of a Sunni ruling elite and, in the past three decades, under Saddam Hussein.
Unrest in Najaf, three days after another leading Shi'ite cleric was murdered at its main mosque, was a further troubling sign for U.S. forces hoping for stability in Iraq after the war.
Abed al-Budairi, an aide to senior cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who was murdered in Najaf on Thursday, told Reuters on Sunday that Sistani had left his Najaf home before it was surrounded by men wielding knives, guns and other weapons, but that Sistani's son was in the building.
KEY RELIGIOUS CENTER
Najaf, where Sistani and many other top Shi'ite spiritual leaders live, is a key center of pilgrimage and religious learning holding the tomb of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and considered the first Shi'ite leader.
"This is the biggest catastrophe. Total terror reigns in Najaf," said Dibaji. "Najaf is a main center of learning, like Oxford in England. It has more than 1,000 years of history."
The city offers enormous financial, political and religious clout to whoever controls it as it emerges from a long isolation imposed by Iraq's secular but Sunni-controlled Baath party.
Charitable donations to the mosque already run into the millions of dollars and a visitor last week saw knee-high piles of money around Ali's tomb.
Senior Shi'ite leaders have blamed Jimaat-e-Sadr-Thani for orchestrating Thursday's killing of Khoei, who was hacked to death by a mob at the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine just days after returning from exile in London to help Iraq make the transition to democracy. Another cleric was also killed in the attack.
Budairi said he believed Sistani had been targeted because he was Iranian-born, and the radical groups opposed to him wanted an Iraqi as the spiritual leader in Najaf.
"They went to his house and told him to leave Najaf because he is not Arab. He (Moqtada) is young, he is immature, he is against Iranian ayatollahs, and he wants the grand Maarja (top Shi'ite spiritual leader) to be Iraqi," he said.
He said a religious leader from non-Arab Afghanistan, Ishaq Sayyaf, had also been told to leave.
U.S. FORCES RETURN
A senior Shi'ite opposition leader in Tehran condemned the siege of Sistani's house.
"We hope that the wise clerics in Iraq manage to control those with more hard-line tendencies and remind them that what is happening in Najaf does not benefit the Iraqi people," he said. "At this critical moment, Iraq needs security, unity and peace."
Friends and relatives say Khoei was the victim of a power struggle among Shi'ite groups for control of Najaf, a city of some 500,000 people 100 miles south of Baghdad.
"Khoei had a central role in running Najaf in the present vacuum and restoring order. That's why they killed him to create this chaotic situation. it was all calculated," Dibaji said.
Khoei, the son of Ayatollah Seyyid Abdulqasim Musawi al-Khoei, who died under arrest in the early 1990s, ran a multinational Muslim charity foundation from London.
At Khoei's request, U.S. troops pulled to the outskirts of Najaf after the city fell to allied forces early this month to avoid tension. Aware of sensitivities in the holy center, U.S. troops have kept their distance since they were forced to retreat from Najaf by crowds blocking the path to the shrine.
Iraqi sources said American forces returned to the city late Saturday to restore order and senior clerics in Najaf were to hold a meeting on Sunday to try to defuse tension.
"U.S. forces entered Najaf, but they have not approached the holy mosque, but will help contain the situation," said Fadhel al-Maleki, a Shi'ite cleric.
Shi'ite sources also said Moqtada himself was keeping a low profile to avoid possible arrest by U.S. forces in connection with Khoei's assassination.
Moqtada is the son of Mohammed Sadeq Sadr, a Shi'ite Muslim spiritual leader killed along with his two other sons in 1999. Their deaths are widely blamed on the Iraqi secret service.