Written by Arkan Radeef / Translated by Shermeen Yousif
The most dangerous people are those who lead religious or sectarian parties without being clergy and whose past is tainted with accusations and suspicions, including the most heinous types of murder, kidnapping, and sectarian incitement, as well as misusing public funds, corruption, violating the law, and with impunity. The Iraqi cleric has always been eager to imbue a religious aura around his person, role, and positions, or to imbue a measure of holiness around his person, party, and orientations, while simultaneously playing a malicious political role in order to achieve personal gains that serve his sick self, which is laden with cruelty and hatred, and his filthy party and its criminal militias.
The land of Mesopotamia is littered with turbaned criminals like Muqtada al-Sadr, Ammar Al-Hakim, and before him Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, Wathiq al-Battat, and Akram al-Kaabi, among others, whose hands and the hands of their militias have always been stained with the blood of Iraq’s innocent citizens.
In this article, I’d like to talk about one of these criminals, Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, the owner of the bloody turban, who has spent years immersed in the world of crime, mafias, and fabricated theocracy. Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, whom Paul Bremer described as a raging sectarian fire, added that al-Saghir was a man born to live alone because he despises everyone.
Al-Saghir did not complete his studies in the Najaf seminary, where he only studied for one year, and he was accused by his friends of writing reports to the Iraqi intelligence on his seminary colleagues. In the early 1980s, Al-Saghir fled to Iran, where his ties with the criminal Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim were strengthened, and he joined the so-called Iraqi Mujahideen Movement, which was fighting alongside the Iranian army against the Iraqi army, and after a short time, he became one of the movement’s leaders and joined the Islamic Supreme Council party.
After returning to Iraq in 2003, he was handed over to the administration of the Buratha mosque in Baghdad’s Al-Atifiya neighborhood, where he turned the mosque into a detention, prison, and court for killing and torturing hundreds of innocent Sunnis and burying them in a cemetery next to the mosque, as well as forming militias known as Al-Hussein’s revenge and death squads that specialized in kidnapping, killing, torturing, and More than once, the Americans raided Al-Headquarters Sagheer’s in Buratha, including one in 2006 in which the joint forces discovered a number of detainees who had been subjected to severe torture. Also, a number of bodies whose owners had died as a result of torture, were buried in the mosque’s backyard. Assassination-related weapons, explosives, and silenced pistols were also discovered. The Al-Sharqiya satellite channel and the Al-Zaman newspaper publicly accused him of leading the “Vanguards of Islam,” a terrorist organization backed by Iran that is active in committing sectarian crimes and killing scientists and pilots who served in the Iran-Iraq war.
His sermons and fatwas were known for inciting murder and fomenting sectarian strife among Iraqis. He has recently attacked peaceful demonstrators in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, referring to them as mercenaries and agents, and referring to them as the embassies party, claiming that they allow immorality and seek to shut down education, state departments, and markets because they want a homeland.
In another contentious sermon, he urged Iraqis to stop buying “chocolate” in order to deal with the country’s economic crisis. It would have been better if the young man had started on his own, reducing his army of mercenaries, protections, and militias, whose salaries are paid from the Iraqi state treasury, and urging his corrupt party (the Supreme Council Party) to stop stealing and wasting public funds.
The turbans of misguidance in Iraq do not unite them except for everything that is immoral and selfish, and that they have failed to manage the state and have put the nation’s and people’s interests aside in favor of their own goals and self-interests, using doctrine as a veil, and that they are not proficient or knowledgeable in the sciences of politics and state administration. They are a chorus of mercenaries, killers, agents, and traitors, but not political parties.