Navigating multiple identities
For almost two decades, policymakers inside and outside Iraq have been puzzled by Sadr’s consequential but highly sporadic decision-making. Many who have engaged with him during this time have expressed frustration at their own inability to predict his next move – or his next tweet. Those who have taken Sadrist rhetoric at face value have often been left feeling surprised, or even betrayed.
Most recently, after the 2021 election, Western and Iraqi policymakers and analysts were again confronted with Sadr’s rhetoric on anti-corruption and reform. Some US and Iraqi policymakers saw Sadr as an important channel for furthering their interests – a tool to combat Iran, support their preferred prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, and reform the struggling Iraqi political system. One former adviser to Kadhimi wrote in May 2022 that Sadr had ‘become the sole possible reformer who can overhaul a hopelessly failed political system’. This support persisted even after the Sadrists had violently suppressed mass protests which had begun in October 2019 (known locally as Thawrat Tishreen – the October Revolution) and called for an end to the corrupt ethno-sectarian basis for the political system (muhasasa).
However, relying on Sadr as an ally for policy or reform is at best a short-term strategy. In the longer term, this approach not only misreads the intentions of the Sadrist movement, but it also risks stifling more genuine reformist currents in political and civil society. Meanwhile, the anticipated gains vis-à-vis Iran will be superficial and are likely to be traded away by Sadr if he consolidates a more dominant leadership position within the Shia Islamist bloc. Ultimately, this approach has emboldened the Sadrists to adopt more risky positions, while intensifying intra-elite competition over the state.
Simple binaries – such as pro-/anti-Iran or pro-/anti-reform – are inadequate in helping to form an understanding of Sadrist politics, which balance multiple identities. These identities have included militant and religious insurgent and system guarantor; the movement has been both a governing party and an opposition protest movement. Particularly since joining the formal political process in 2005, the Sadrists have balanced these different roles within an overall strategy of controlled instability. This meant pursuing limited destabilization of the system at strategic moments to gain popular support and political leverage, but ultimately conforming to the fundamental rules of political competition.
The underlying logic of controlled instability can help make some sense of Sadr’s actions within a long-term perspective. Politically, the Sadrists have tended to work alongside other Shia Islamist parties, anchoring a Shia-centric vision of politics in the Iraqi state. Even when the movement has campaigned electorally against this system – as happened in 2018, when the Sadrists denounced the muhasasa – Sadr still acted to stabilize the system in the post-election phase. Sadrist violence and power of mobilization also proved indispensable to the crushing of the Tishreen uprising of October 2019 and the restabilization of a political system in the face of massive social unrest and demands for radical political change.
Militarily, the Sadrists are no longer the militia that fought Western forces and engaged in sectarian violence, intra-Shia militia warfare, and chaotic criminality between 2003 and 2009. Rather, the movement’s coercive power was regulated within the political economy of violence that maintained the Iraqi state. The Sadrists’ paramilitary wing, Saraya al-Salam (SAS), turned away from the self-mobilizing religious zeal of its original incarnation, Jaysh al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army). Today, like other militias, SAS is integrated into the political economy of the Iraqi state, and is less likely to challenge the system either through insurgency or civil war.
Sadr’s own insurgency, in military, political and religious terms, proved a brief dalliance that quickly gave way to a more system-conforming role. For instance, in the religious sphere, Sadr gradually abandoned his challenge to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani after 2004. Since then, he has sought to bolster his authority by aligning his religious and political positions with those of Sistani. (For example, Sadr frequently weaponizes Sistani’s statements against the political class for his own purposes.) Sadr’s actions have therefore tended to stabilize the religious hierarchy centred on the holy city of Najaf and to bolster its role as a quasi-constitutional force in Iraqi politics.
Balancing controlled instability
Unlike many rival groupings, the Sadrist movement is not merely a construct for managing the distribution of resources within elite networks. It has also remained a mass social movement, constraining the Sadrist leadership to balance elite politics against management of its base. The Sadrists found a critical equilibrium between 2015 and 2018, when Sadr instigated successive mass protests against the government calling for political reform (including, notably, a sit-in protest in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone in 2016) even though hundreds of senior officials and decision-makers in many parts of the state had generated revenue for his movement.
Sadr’s dovetailing of this protest movement within an electoral platform was sufficiently credible to energize his own base and to draw Shia youth from Sadrist backgrounds into electoral politics for the first time. At the same time, Sadr also built ties to other established political parties and representatives of the so-called ‘civil trend’, which was attracted to the large-scale mobilizing power of the Sadrist base. Some staunch secularists, liberals and leftist thinkers were willing to work with the Islamist leader because they believed it to be the only way to overcome the post-2003 political order to exploit divisions within the Shia Islamist elite.
From the Sadrist perspective, the strategy was a stunning electoral success. Sadr convinced many that he was a protest leader, despite keeping his key levers of power within the state. Support for the Sadrist-led coalition in Iraq’s parliamentary elections almost doubled in terms of vote share, from 917,589 in 2014 (a 7 per cent share of the total) to 1,493,542 (14 per cent) in 2018. Of this increase, about one-third was attributable to gains by the Sadrists’ leftist and liberal allies, and two-thirds to the increase in the Sadrists’ own electoral base. To put this success in perspective, the non-Sadrist Shia Islamist vote declined from 4.5 million to 3.7 million votes over the same period.
The 2018 election serves as Sadr’s blueprint for political success because it drew from both the Sadrist base and the growing disillusionment embodied in protest-based movements. Moving forward, he is looking to repeat this success by building relations with protest movements linked to Tishreen.
Tilting too closely to the government?
The balance of controlled instability can easily be lost. Following the 2018 election, Sadr remained wary of being too closely linked to the government. One month after the election, he refused to acknowledge publicly his reported government formation deal with Hadi al-Ameri, head of the rival Shia Fateh Alliance, insisting on referring to their agreement as an ‘understanding’. Nevertheless, the details of the deal were at variance with the reformist demands of protests led by Sadr himself. As the Sadrists entered more areas of the government, Sadr conformed more closely with the status quo of consensus politics. This prompted expressions of profound disillusionment among his own supporters.
Sensitivity around being seen to openly promote the status quo drove Sadr’s policy of appointing independent or technocratic ministers to the government in 2018. These officials (which included Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, an economist) could present a ‘clean’ and impartial image in the upper ranks of the Iraqi government, while, critically, still falling within Sadr’s control, being empowered by their association with him to assume responsibility for important decisions.
The Sadrists’ 2018 electoral victory prompted a gradual expansion of Sadrist networks across the Iraqi state, so that by October 2021, when the next election was held, the bloc represented the leading political entity in the state. Yet, the Sadrists’ political success and increased control over the state did not benefit the movement’s popular base in a material sense. Having de facto control over ministries such as health and electricity allowed the Sadrists to generate financial resources through awarding favourable contracts, but the gains were not distributed evenly through the movement. Chatham House’s survey data reveals the extent to which in 2022 the core of the Sadrist base remains overwhelmingly mired either in unemployment or in the most insecure forms of work.
Having de facto control over ministries such as health and electricity allowed the Sadrists to generate financial resources through awarding favourable contracts, but the gains were not distributed evenly through the movement.
According to the top-line survey data (see Figure 2b, below), 61 per cent of the total sample identified as unemployed. However, when those self-identifying as students are excluded, this figure rose to 74 per cent overall, and to 79 per cent of under-35s. Meanwhile, of those respondents in some form of employment and not self-identifying as students, 75 per cent reported being daily-wage workers or in other forms of insecure employment (such as autorickshaw driving). This meant only 25 per cent identified as being in secure employment (overwhelmingly in the public sector). Overall (see Figure 2c) only 19 per cent of the sample was in secure employment. In the 18–24 age group (of which a majority were students), 60 per cent of respondents considered that their economic outlook (in terms of their living conditions) was either much worse or worse than their fellow citizens, with only 5 per cent considering it to be better. (See Figure 2a.) Across all age groups surveyed, these beliefs were held by 44 per cent and 20 per cent of respondents respectively. Thus, increasing electoral power has not allowed the majority of the Sadrist social base to penetrate the coveted mainstream of public sector employment (malak al-daim) and therefore the socioeconomic status of those Sadr supporters remains unchanged.
