“Everything is going to be changed”

Iraqi Shi’ite supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr celebrate near a burning U.S. Army truck in the Shuala neighborhood of Baghdad April 5, 2004. A U.S. soldier and a Marine were killed in separate attacks by guerrillas in Iraq, the U.S. army. It said the Marine was killed in the tense area west of Baghdad. The soldier was killed by a car bomb in the northern city of Kirkuk Sunday. (Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters)

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor, who announced the warrant, would not say when al-Sadr would be detained. “There’ll be no advance warning,” he said.

Since the violence, al-Sadr has been holed up in a mosque in the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, surrounded by armed supporters.

The arrest warrant had been issued several months ago, Senor said, refusing to say why al-Sadr had not been arrested earlier or why its existence was only announced Monday, one day after the al-Sadr-inspired violence.

Earlier in his career, after Hebrew University and Harvard Business School, Senor was with the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with Bush family ties and big defense industry holdings. Senor jogged in a Thanksgiving Day race here wearing a “Bush-Cheney 2004” T-shirt.

Known as the Green Room, the press office is inside coalition headquarters in the Republican Palace that used to belong to Saddam Hussein. The palace is in central Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.

The office counts 21 Republicans — 11 of whom have worked inside the Bush administration before their Iraq posting — among its 58 U.S. civilian staffers, according to figures Senor provided.

More than half a dozen CPA officials in the press office worked on Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign or are related to Bush campaign workers, according to payroll records filed with the Federal Elections Commission.

Republican figures also permeate the wider CPA staff, including top advisers to U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and the Iraqi ministries.

The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.

KUFA, Iraq (AFP) – A close aide of Shiite Muslim radical leader Moqtada Sadr said the Iraqi cleric was “proud” to be an outlaw after US civil administrator Paul Bremer branded him outside the law.

“If Bremer means that Sayed Moqtada is an outlaw according to the US laws, then I’m proud of it,” Sadr aide Sheikh Qais al-Khazaalie told AFP on Monday, quoting the cleric after a meeting.

“If he means that Sayed Moqtada is an outlaw according to Sharia (Islamic laws) and the laws we know, then Bremer knows nothing about these laws and it is he who violates these laws,” he said, using a Muslim title.

“We reject all kinds of occupation and hegemony. Everything is going to be changed.”