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Rory McCarthy in the Observer reports from Najaf:

Throughout the week the golden-domed shrine had been at the centre of the rebellion. It was here that Sadr probably spent his days and here that his young clerics controlled the fight through radios and mobiles. Fighters would check their weapons at the gate and walk in to collect plastic containers of water, or to have their wounds bandaged. Every few hours the mosque’s loudspeakers exhort his men to battle.

‘You are defending Imam Ali, the prince of the faithful. Hit them and protect your shrine. Hit them and protect your holy city. Be patient and fight. Victory will be yours with the help of God,’ they announced at one stage. An hour later, after midday prayers, it continued: ‘Fighters return to your positions. The enemy is running away. Go to your places immediately.’

In the end the sanctity of the shrine, one of the holiest sites in the Shia faith, is what gave Sadr his strength. It left the Iraqi government and the US reluctant to press on into the old city, however much the US military commanders wanted to. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, admitted as much when he said the US was ‘squeezing’ Najaf to stop the fighting but then added: ‘We do not wish to get involved with the mosque. It’s a very holy place for all Shia.’

You couldn’t get a clearer example of the indissoluble link between religion and politics in Islam, and the extent to which people like Sadr are willing to trade on the commonly accepted inviolability of religious sites for their own political purposes.

At least McCarthy’s clear that Sadr remains unpopular with the majority of Iraqis:

Although Sadr had thousands of supporters around him yesterday, his remains a movement of extremists unloved by the majority of the Iraqi population, however frustrated they are with the military occupation of the past year.

As we walked back from the mosque, past the frontlines, Iraqis sat on their doorsteps watching. ‘Why do you come here to see the misery in Najaf?’ said one woman. ‘May God take his revenge on the one who is responsible for this.’ Another man ran to us shouting: ‘Muqtada and his thugs are outlaws. They are criminals and they are not from Najaf.’

No mention of Iran though: surely the key to what’s happening in Najaf. Read this impassioned post from Alaa at the Mesopotamian.

Now and then you come across an article on a subject to which you’ve never ever given a moment’s thought:

What does this sound like to you: Splat! KruuuuunNCH! Ker-bang! POW!? Is it Spiderman sorting out his enemies in the new Hollywood blockbuster? Or is it the sound of comic-book English duffing up the less muscular languages of the comic-book world?

According to some linguists and phonologists, the comic-book onomatopoeias of English, all those Ba-doingggs, Oooofs and Grrrrrs — used to amplify thought, action and speech in comic strips — are supplanting the native sound-words used in the comics of smaller languages: and altering these languages at root.

This may seem counterintuitive. Surely onomatopoeias are the same the world over? No. Some sound-words are different simply because of the alternative pronunciation of letters: hee hee hee in English is ji ji ji in Spanish; Swedish cars don’t toot, they tut. Other differences are more subtle, and traditional. The cat’s miaow in English is nyao in Japanese. Someone drinking wine in French makes a glou-glou sound, rather like our glug-glug. French steam trains go tchou-tchou; the Swedish for splash! is plaska!; and Korean cuckoos go ppu-kookk ppu-kookk.

Many onomatopoeias vary strongly or simply have no foreign equivalents. French guns go papop! Danish ambulance sirens go barbu-barbu. Chinese bees don’t buzz, they weng; Swedish cockroaches make a cackerlacka noise; Burmese saxophones go eBa. In Japan the first raindrops in a storm go potsun-potsun; a rich head of hair makes a fusa-fusa noise; and poka-poka is the “sound” something makes when it is nice and warm (think of the bling of our garish jewellery).

I like that Danish barbu-barbu. What sound do Anglophone ambulances make? And potsun-potsun is wonderful. Ah well, it’s one more thing for us to worry about. But read to the end of the article and you’ll see that Japanese onomatopoeia is remarkably rich (as you’d guess from that potsun-potsun) and not at all under threat. Chinese though looks like a lost cause: weng for the sound of a bee? I don’t know what kind of bee they have in China, but I wouldn’t like to meet one.

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The Shia majority of Iraq, long oppressed under Saddam, was ripe for insurgency or even revolution long before Saddam fell. Iran’s radical Shia kakistocracy has been funding, supplying — and in Sadr’s case operating — the insurgency in Shia Iraq ever since Coalition forces began massing to attack Iraq in 2002. According to one estimate, there are at least 30,000 Iranian-funded insurgents in Iraq.

One of the Iranians’ principal obstacles has been Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shia mullah in Iraq. Al-Sistani has called on Sadr to stop the fighting, but his power over Sadr is limited, and Sadr’s is expanded greatly by his Iranian backers. When al-Sistani left Iraq for medical treatment in London, Iran and Sadr began the latest round of fighting in Najaf and in the “Sadr City” area of Baghdad, the huge slum that used to be known as “Saddam City.”

There is important dissension among the new Iraqi government about whether American forces should be allowed to take the fight to Sadr in the heart of Najaf. Early Thursday, Ibrahim Jaafari, head of the Dawa party and one of Iraq’s two interim vice presidents, called for all American forces to leave Najaf. If we and the Allawi forces fail in Najaf, the internal dissention could cause a split in the interim government that won’t be healed soon. Al-Sistani, speaking from London, called for another ceasefire. If these pressures split the new Iraqi government, that alone would be a significant victory for Iran, which will stop at nothing to prevent the Iraqi democracy from taking root.

The Iraqi go-ahead against Sadr was given some time Wednesday, within some well-understood limits. The holiest site in Shia Islam is the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, and it is from this mosque and other sites in Najaf that Sadr and his militia have been launching their attacks. Imam Ali — who is buried in the shrine — is revered as the founder of Shia Islam. Ali was the six-year-old who took Mohammed’s place in his bed on a night when Mohammed expected an assassination attempt, and is believed by the Shia to have had divine guidance. But the Shia radicals — and I still believe that term isn’t redundant — see no inconsistency in using their holiest site as a base for terrorist activity. We’ve all seen the television coverage of them running out of the mosque, RPGs, and other weapons in hand, to engage American troops. […]

If the Imam Ali shrine is destroyed in a Coalition operation, the Iranians will use that fact to divide and discredit the Allawi government. They will try to raise all of Shia Islam against the American occupiers in Iraq and American interests everywhere. The Shia are the second-largest Islamic sect, with about 700 million adherents in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa. It is quite conceivable that the destruction of the Imam Ali mosque would trigger the clash of civilizations that Iran and Osama bin Laden have been working desperately to create. It could be a significantly destabilizing force in nations such as India and Pakistan where our influence and fragile alliances could easily wither and die. Too much hangs in the balance in Najaf. But the fight has to be made because Iran, and its Sadr proxy, are the two most significant obstacles to freedom in Iraq.

An American encounters the London smart set: this (via Talking Hoarsely) is amusing:

The war on terror, announces one guest, could have been avoided if the Americans hadn’t invaded Iraq. But the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon–not to mention various embassy bombings and the assault on the Cole–preceded the invasion of Iraq, I noted, in a gentle effort to help this guest reorganize her calendar of events. Ah, but original sin, the event that preceded all of the ones I cited, is the Jews’ beastly treatment of the Arabs.

We are gluttons for punishment, not to mention for wonderful puddings of the sort being set before us. So we decided that the guestly thing to do was to stifle our desire to leave, running the risk that continuing the discussion might result in the violent response many Brits assume comes naturally to gun-totin’, SUV-drivin’, Americans. (They couldn’t work their God-fearing epithet into that litany, as it might have impelled us to turn the other cheek, which they for some strange reason don’t expect of God-fearing Americans.)

Besides, rational argument will conquer all, I was brought up to believe. So I gently inquired, “What would you have done after September 11 if you were president of the United States?” The answer did more than even a steady diet of BBC broadcasts can do to make us realize just what Tony Blair is up against: “I would have been nicer to the Arabs, and made the Jews be nicer to the Arabs.”

Mind you: this is not Nancy Astor explaining the virtues of Adolf Hitler to her anti-Semitic friends in the run-up to World War II. This is Great Britain, circa 2004.

they were against the far right in its political or clerical guise. (Or, in the case of the Catholic fascisms of France and Spain, its political and its clerical guise.) The solidity of the conviction imposed constraints – however critical the old left was of capitalist democracies, there were alternatives to democracy that it would never tolerate. The constraints also brought honour because they instilled the ideal of fraternity. The victims of far-right regimes were guaranteed support through the international backing from the democratic and the totalitarian left.

Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won’t detain you for long. Apart from the odd call from the Socialist International, there has been none worthy of the name. One expects the totalitarian left to be stuffed with creeps, but the collapse of the democratic left strikes me as catastrophic. Why couldn’t it oppose the second Gulf war while promising to do everything possible to advance the cause of Iraqi democrats and socialists once the war was over? Why the sneering, almost racist pretence that Saddam had no honourable opponents?

The ineluctable answer is, I’m afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore films don’t look at his propaganda images of kite-flying kiddies and pull themselves up short by thinking of what happened to their comrades in Iraq. They have no comrades. They don’t support Saddam. They don’t support his foes. They have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred by failure.

Marxist-Leninism is as dead as any idea can be – it made the fatal blunder of putting its ideas into practice and died of shame. Fifty years ago, there were revolutionary socialist movements in dozens of countries ready to take power. Today there isn’t one, and the world is a better place for that. The nobler traditions of the social-democratic left are also under enormous strain. It seems that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown is about as good as it can get in Britain. Europe has leaders who appear more left-wing on paper, but to date they have failed to pull the Continent away from stagnation.

Unless you believe that the failure of the world’s peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead. The anger that propelled it is still there, and although it won many battles, some of the oppressions it fought against remain as grievous as ever.

The pity of the aftermath is that while the honourable traditions of the left are forgotten, the worst flourish and mutate into aberrations that would have made our predecessors choke.

Update: Hmm…the article seems now to be only for subscribers…or do they allow you one free access and then insert the subscriber-only page?

From Lebanon’s Daily Star:

The United Nations’ envoy to Sudan tried to ease the pressure on Khartoum after a flurry of indictments of the government’s failure to end the crisis in Darfur drew irate reactions from President Omar al-Beshir.

Jan Pronk, quoted Thursday in the Akhbar al-Yowm daily, said an action plan agreed to by Khartoum “does not set 30 days as a deadline but as a period which can be renewed and amended until all provisions” of a Security Council resolution are implemented.

The action plan for Darfur signed Tuesday by Pronk and Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail gave the authorities 30 days to create safe areas for civilians to search for food and cultivate their land without fear of attack.

The deal was already backtracking on a July 30 UN Security Council resolution giving Khartoum 30 days to crack down on the pro-government Arab janjaweed militias, which are accused of committing atrocities against the black African population in Darfur.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s envoy on the ground was trying to ease the war of words which has been escalating between the world body and Khartoum.

Clearly the most important task here, as Pronk has realised, is not to offend the Sudanese government.

Meanwhile the African Union is on the case. In an exciting new development a meeting has been proposed:

On Thursday Libyan Foreign Minister Abderrahman Shalgham said that Tripoli had proposed to the African Union that it stage a meeting of all the parties in the Darfur conflict.

Shalgham, in an interview with the Egyptian government-owned Al-Ahram daily, said the Sudanese government should be helped to carry out its commitments, and warned against the dispatch of Western troops to Darfur.

“It would be a disaster,” he said. “Islamists would come from everywhere on the pretext of fighting a holy war, the people of Darfur would also fight, the problem would become more difficult and Darfur would become a new Afghanistan, a second Iraq.”

Interesting take on things there: the man is worried that Darfur could become a new Iraq or Afghanistan. Fifty odd thousand massacred so far, a million or so displaced, many more deaths almost certain as the murder and rape continues unabated….Iraq and Afghanistan are oases of sanity in comparison. The main priority apparently is that the Sudanese government should be helped to carry out its commitments. By now we know all too well what those commitments are, and what they entail for the wretched black Africans of Darfur.

the North Korean regime have contributed directly and indirectly to the humanitarian crisis in the country. The absolute control over citizens’ lives, the distribution of benefits according to political loyalty, the ultimate threat of banishment of whole families to prison camps for political offenses all point to human rights abuses of the most egregious nature. Many of those who have successfully fled the regime, including former Workers Party SecretaryHwang Jang Hyop, refer to the North as one large prison camp and suggest that the sooner the regime falls, the sooner relief will come to the people. Others point to the massive misallocation of resources by the regime. Scarce funds and resources are poured into military programs and Kim cult monuments while hospitals lack heat, basic medicines and equipment. Another argument is that only fundamental changes in economic structure and policies will bring an end to the crisis, and find little evidence that the Kim Il Jong is willing or able to implement such reforms. So, should aid agencies simply hold back and “let nature take its course”?

One impact that is profound in its implications is that North Korea, for all its trumpeting on self-reliance, has become fundamentally dependent on the charity of the international community for the survival of a large portion of its population.

Zeyad at Healing Iraq dismisses the conspiracy theories doing the rounds concerning Sistani’s sudden departure for London:

While several of his spokesmen have denied that the medical condition of the 74 year-old cleric is critical, I have personally heard from an informed source who is a close relative of Sistani’s agent in Basrah that he has been suffering from ischemic heart disease for some time and that he had recently experienced a myocardial infarction just 2 or 3 weeks before the fighting broke out in Najaf.

He was advised by his family and close supporters to leave Najaf immediately for treatment and rest in London. They had already coordinated with Iraqi, US and British authorities for the preparations. The old man stubbornly refused to leave, mentioning that he had remained in Najaf during even darker days. However, he resigned grudgingly to their suggestions later on. He was practically hauled to London by his son and his senior aides.

According to Zeyad, the most likely successor is a known moderate:

Grand Ayatollah Al-Fayyadh is known to be the most moderate of Shi’ite marji’iya, even more so than Sistani. He belongs to the traditional old school of the Hawza (that of Abu Al-Hassan Al-Asfahani, Sadiq Al-Shirazi, Al-Barujardi, Hussein Kashif Al-Ghatta’, Muhsin Al-Hakim, and Al-Khoei) that calls for a distinct seperation of state and religion and an utter contempt for the notion of Wilayet Al-Faqih (the rule of the jurisprudent) that was preached by Khomeini and taken up by the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

ld easily have got them home and killed them. I might have got away with it, I might not. But we believe in fighting in the right place.”

Oddly enough these remarks aren’t considered worth reporting by the Guardian’s man.

Update: I see Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution has already covered this.

If Omar at Iraq the Model is right, fifteen thousand Iranians have volunteered for suicide attacks in Iraq.

The registration process started in last June following the clashes between the coalition forces in Iraq and Sadr’s militia in Najaf and the latest clashes have “provoked more people to volunteer”.

Memories of the brigades of child martyrs in the Iran-Iraq war….

The Iranian government said that this initiative has nothing to do with the government and refused the accusations of interfering in Iraq’s internal affairs saying that the Iraqi officials need to prove these accusations or remain silent.

Meanwhile the dialogue between Iran and the “EU-3” – France Germany and the UK – over the question of nuclear technology is, um, not going well:

The “EU-3” were trying to convince Iranian officials to honour an earlier deal to suspend its controversial uranium enrichment programme, which is ostensibly designed to make fuel for nuclear power stations but could also be used to make fissile material for nuclear bombs.

Iranian officials refused point-blank to comply, saying they had every right under international law to pursue “peaceful” nuclear technology.

They then stunned the Europeans by presenting a letter setting out their own demands.

Iran said the EU-3 should support Iran’s quest for “advanced (nuclear) technology, including those with dual use” – a reference to equipment that has both civilian and military applications.

The Europeans should “remove impediments” preventing Iran from having such technology, and stick to these commitments even if faced with “legal (or) political . . . limitations”, an allusion to American pressure or even future international sanctions against Iran.

More astonishingly, Iran said the EU-3 should agree to meet Iran’s requirements for conventional weapons and even “provide security assurances” against a nuclear attack on Iran.