History
Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq was founded in 1982 during the Iran–Iraq War after the leading Islamist insurgent group, Islamic Dawa Party, was severely weakened by a government crackdown following Dawa's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Islamic revolutionary government arranged for the formation of SCIRI, which was based in exile in Tehran and under the leadership of Mohammad-Baqir al-Hakim. Hakim, living in exile in Iran, was the son of Ayatollah Mohsen-Hakim and a member of one of the leading Shi'a clerical families in Iraq. "He declared the primary aim of the council to be the overthrow of the Ba'ath and the establishment of an Islamic government in Iraq. Iranian officials referred to Hakim as the leader of Iraq's future Islamic state ..."
SCIRI was designed to be an umbrella organization that would unite under one banner the various Iraqi Shia groups, including al-Dawa and Munazamat. For this reason, it has been likened to the American-backed Iraqi National Congress.
However, there are crucial ideological differences between SCIRI and al-Dawa. SCIRI supports the ideologies of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that Islamic Government must be controlled by the ulema (Islamic scholars). Al-Dawa, on the other hand, follows the position of Iraq's late Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, and al-Dawa co-founder, that government should be controlled by the ummah (Muslim community as a whole).
Despite this ideological disagreement, several of SCIRI's factions came from al-Dawa before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This historical intersection is significant because al-Dawa was widely viewed as a terrorist group during the Iran–Iraq War. In February 2007, journalists reported that Jamal Jaafar Muhammed, who was elected to the Iraqi parliament in 2005 as part of the SCIRI/Badr faction of the United Iraqi Alliance, was also sentenced to death in Kuwait for planning the al-Dawa bombings of the French and American embassies in that country in 1983.
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