One of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite political parties dropped the word “revolution” from its name on Saturday in an apparent attempt to keep its distance from Iran. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) will henceforth be known as the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq. Party leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a top Shiite cleric, announced the name change at a news conference called to confirm his re-election at the head of the party, which is part of Iraq’s ruling coalition. “Revolution means change. This is what we sought from the creation of the Council,” Hakim told reporters, explaining that the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein had made the revolutionary tag obsolete. “The Council participated in realising political changes in Iraq, the most important of which was regime change. So this word became unnecessary,” he said, flanked by Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, a SCIRI member.
Hakim and his brother, the late Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, founded SCIRI as an opposition movement in exile in Iraq’s Shiite neighbour Iran in 1982, under the protection of Tehran’s Islamic regime. “Maybe it’s part of distancing themselves from the past. They were founded in Iran after the revolution there and the situation has changed a lot since then,” Kurdish legislator Mahmud Othman told AFP.
Joost Hiltermann, Iraq analyst at the International Crisis Group, said: “Despite being the largest Shiite party, SCIRI has always been unpopular. It has never had much popular support because of its past. “It was created by the Iranian secret services in the 1980s and so it has a lot of political baggage. It wants to disassociate itself from Khomeini’s revolution and from Iran in general,” he explained.