Through his decision to trim Mahdi Army, Sadr hopes to salvage some of Mahdi Army’s best trained and most loyal units, and put them under one command to operate in a secretive manner and, ostensibly, only against US targets. If Muqtada’s plan is to make his militia operate in manner akin to al Qaeda Iraq by keeping a low profile and using selective targeting of opponents and occasional spectacular attacks like the recent car-bombing in Hurriyah district, then Mahdi Army will continue to be a source of trouble; but not of the magnitude seen 2006 and 2007. However, the problem for Sadr is that al Qaeda Iraq itself is on the verge of being defeated; trying to copy the methods of a defeated power isn’t likely to lead Sadr to a better end.
Other possible rationales for Sadr’s decision to disband the larger Mahdi Army include:
• Shedding extra unnecessary “weight:” The current larger Mahdi Army has many thousands of poorly trained foot soldiers. Those were proven to be effective in paralyzing life and spreading fear in several cities over the last few years. However, Muqtada’s ability to deploy these mobs to take over the streets has been drastically compromised following the recent crackdowns by US troops and Iraqi security forces. Sadr may get rid of these soldiers simply because they are no longer suitable for his goals. These untrained mobs could easily act as a shadow army for the shadow government Sadr wanted to establish, but they are not qualified to be members of a professional guerrilla army.
• Leaderless resistance: Sadr’s announcement could be a trick: vowing to fight the occupier until victory or death, while concurrently giving this “honor” to a small, select group. He’s basically telling his followers that fighting is good, but you shouldn’t do it. The result would be that some or many of those followers will indeed go against his orders and continue fighting. In this case, Sadr gets the service he needs from those men, while maintaining the ability to claim that Mahdi Army is not responsible and those men do not represent him.
• Preventing infiltration by informants/Iraqi security forces: Sadr’s emphasis on secrecy in his letter may indicate that he’s trying to limit the number of people that have access to information concerning the planning, operations, structure, command and control, logistics, and other secretive information of the Mahdi Army in order to prevent any security breaches. Sadr’s advisors may have convinced him that the smaller the army, the less likely it will be infiltrated, and the less likely that civilian locals will be able to get information to relay to Iraqi security forces and US troops. Muqtada’s fear from infiltration may have been exacerbated by the formation of Awakening groups in his main stronghold of Sadr City; especially that many of the Awakening men are relatives or neighbors of Mahdi Army fighters, if not were themselves members of the Mahdi Army.
• Emulating Hezbollah: Since Hezbollah plays a significant role in training and organizing the Mahdi army, this decision may be an attempt to reform the militia and make it evolve into something similar to Hezbollah. It is common knowledge that Hezbollah maintains a force of 2-3 thousand well-trained, active fighters prepared for immediate duty. Thousands of others Hezbollah operative serve in the social, financial and other civil society networks of the group, in addition to a reserve paramilitary force. In fact, rebuilding the Mahdi army following Hezbollah’s example of a clear separation between the armed and civil wings is what Sadr literally said in his letter a few weeks back.
Whatever the rationale, it is clear that Sadr is scrambling to make adjustments to his plans. The results of the recent fighting with the Iraqi security forces and US troops rendered the Mahdi army incapable of sustaining Sadr’s Plan ‘A,’ forcing him to accept a new plan with a smaller army. Cf. http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2008/07/analysis.php.
My personal view is the latter, the Mahdi are evolving into a Hezbollah-type counter-society directed by Iran. With the failure of AQ to be competitive, and largely viewed as a foreign oppressor, AQ did not capture the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Sadr, due to the respect bestowed on his father, is still seen as an Iraqi power player. He will sacrifice anyone he needs to, as did Arafat, in order to advance the agenda of his co-religionists, the Shi'ite Iranians.
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