BAGHDAD -- When Ali Ateya was killed last month at the age of 23 -- a victim of an American airstrike on a block of concrete tenements in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, according to his family -- there was no money for his burial.
Within days, two officials from Sadr City's main humanitarian organization showed up at the family home. Unsolicited, they offered to pay for Ateya's Shiite Muslim burial service and provide food for three days of ritual mourning.
Then they handed the parents an envelope. It was stuffed with 500,000 Iraqi dinars -- about $400 -- and on it was printed: ``A gift from Sayyid Muqtada al Sadr.'
Sadr, the fiery anti-American Shiite cleric, has again emerged as the U.S. military's No. 1 problem in Iraq, as his followers wage an increasingly bloody struggle with American soldiers for control of impoverished, militia-infested Sadr City.
But for the slum's 2.5 million predominantly Shiite residents, Sadr plays a different role, one of humanitarian-in-chief -- gifting money to families of the dead and injured, resettling displaced families free of charge and, every month, helping to feed tens of thousands of Sadr City's most impoverished people. Sadr offers the funds for any victim of American weapons in Sadr City.
Evoking comparisons with Hezbollah -- the far better established militant Shiite group in Lebanon that's often called a state within a state -- Sadr's movement 'has established itself as the main service provider in the country,' concluded a recent report by Refugees International, a Washington-based nonprofit.
Analysts point out that Hezbollah's military wing is much more disciplined than Sadr's younger and more fractured movement. But Sadr's charity work helps to maintain popular support for his movement even as its confrontations with U.S. and Iraqi forces plunge places such as Sadr City deeper into chaos...
