NYT: Muqtada al-Sadr creating 'parallel government' in Iraq
 Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has begun to reassert himself in Iraq, reports the New York Times.
"After months of lying low, the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd two-tiered strategy that reaches out to Iraqis on the street and distances him from the increasingly unpopular government," writes Alissa Rubin.
al-Sadr has begun a grassroots campaign that appears to be modeled after Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to provide services to Iraqi citizens that the government is not providing. Rubin reports that this is in effect creating a "parallel government" in Iraq.
Excerpts follow:
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He has also extended the reach of his Mahdi Army, one of the armed groups that the White House report acknowledged remain entrenched in Iraq. The militia has effectively taken over vast swaths of the capital and is fighting government troops in several southern provinces. Although the militia sometimes uses brutal tactics, including death squads, many vulnerable Shiites are grateful for the protection it affords.
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His basic tenets are widely shared. Like most Iraqis, he opposes the American military presence and wants a timetable for departure -- if only to attain some certainty that the Americans will leave eventually. He wants the country to stay unified and opposes the efforts of those Shiites who have had close ties to Iran to create a semiautonomous Shiite region in southern Iraq.
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"Sadr holds the political center in Iraq," said Joost Hiltermann, the director of the International Crisis Group's office in Amman, Jordan. "They are nationalist, they want to hold the country together and they are the only political organization that has popular support among the Shias. If you try to exclude him from any alliance, well, it's a nutty idea, it's unwise.
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