A militant group implicated in a recent rocket attack on U.S. forces in Iraq has declared a ceasefire during Pope Francis’s visit, a grudging suspension of hostilities that hints at the political importance of the papal tour.
“We stop all forms military action during the Pope’s visit,” Saraya Awliya al Dam, Arabic for the Guardians of Blood, announced prior to the pontiff’s arrival.
The pledge offers a measure of reassurance as the pope visits territory roiled by threats from Iranian-backed militias; the Guardians claimed responsibility for last month’s rocket attack on Erbil, which President Biden countered by bombing a base in Syria used by Iranian forces and their proxies.
“They would not escalate during a visit like this because it would backfire immensely,” said New Lines Institute senior analyst Rasha al Aqeedi, an Iraqi national who hails originally from Mosul. “Any kind of violence during the pope’s visit that would endanger his life, that would severely backfire on them. They would be blacklisted everywhere.”
POPE CALLS ON IRAQ TO SUPPORT CHRISTIANS DURING HISTORIC VISIT
The pope’s visit will take him into the Iraqi regions where the Iranian-backed forces have demonstrated their deadliness, even into Erbil, the scene of the recent barrage. He will travel Saturday to Najaf, a holy city for Shia Muslims, to meet Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani — perhaps the most revered leader in the Shia Muslim world. The Guardians’s statement explained the ceasefire is intended “to express our respect to Imam al-Sistani, because we are Arabs and we honor the guest.”
And yet, the public rhetoric from the militants makes clear that the papal tour presents a challenge to the Iranian position in Iraq. Sistani rejects the Iranian revolution’s understanding of “wilayat al faqih” (the rule of the jurist) — the theology of the first Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini, who claimed the right to wield not only spiritual power but political authority over “the administration of the country.”
Sistani, by contrast, espouses a “quietist” tradition that abjures clerical control of the government.
“It’s been theocratic tension and a doctrinal tension amongst the Shia,” said Raad Alkadiri, a lead policy adviser at the British Embassy in Baghdad at the height of the Iraq War. “Where it’s manifested politically really is this battle between an Iranian system and this system that’s evolved in Iraq, where clerics, led by Sistani … have been there as a source of guidance but have kept themselves very separate from actually engaging and taking up offices in government directly.”
In short, the compulsion to “respect” for the pope’s meeting with Sistani puts the Iranian-aligned militias in the position of honoring an encounter between the Roman Catholic leader and the Shia teacher, whose example poses a challenge to Iranian ambitions in Iraq.
“Even those groups that sort of are assumed to be most closely tied to Iran feel the need to pay deference to Najaf,” Alkadiri said. “That says a lot about Sistani, it says a lot about. Obviously, why the pope would see him and what the political optics and what the political repercussions and theological repercussions could be.”
Iran’s proxies aren’t hiding their distaste for the visit, complaining especially about the pope’s plan to visit Ur, the birthplace of Abraham, for an interreligious service of “prayer for the sons and daughters of Abraham” — a reference to Abraham’s role as a seminal prophet in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
“We must not be overly optimistic about the visit of the ‘Pope of the Vatican’ and that he will make our lands cool and safe,” Kata’ib Hezbollah spokesman Abu Ali al Askari wrote Wednesday on social media.
“There’s a conspiracy in Ur city under the facade of interfaith dialogue,” he added before congratulating “resistance” fighters for the latest “attack on US forces at Ein Al-Asad” base in Iraq.
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If Francis’s call for fraternal relations between people of different faiths can dovetail with Sistani’s concept of a “civil state” that is not ruled by clerics, analysts suggest, then their meeting could show Shia Muslims, and the world at large, the nature of an Iraq, bruised by terrorism and war but not yet destroyed.
“This kind of humanization of Iraq might open up different policy discussions,” said al Aqeedi, the New Lines Institute analyst. “This is something else that I don’t believe that these pro-Iran militias want … They are really trying to isolate the country, so [the pope’s visit] might help counter that.”
