The members of the delegation are all participants in a national conference that was convened Sunday in Baghdad to select an interim national assembly. Although the assembly was to have been elected by Tuesday, the proceedings have been dominated by efforts to resolve the crisis in Najaf, where U.S. forces have been in combat with the Mahdi Army for weeks. The conference is scheduled to reconvene on Wednesday to hear from the delegation and to choose members of the new assembly.
Political leaders spent much of Tuesday in closed-door meetings trying to persuade leaders of Shiite religious parties to back down from a demand that their members receive at least 51 of the 100 seats. Although Shiites constitute a majority of Iraqis, conference organizers and leaders of parties representing Sunni Muslims and ethnic Kurds do not want all the Shiite members to be chosen by religious parties.
_____Who Is Sadr?_____
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Q & A: More on the firebrand Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army has been fighting U.S. and Iraqi troops.
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The delegation to Najaf was led by Hussein Mohammed Hadi Sadr, an elderly Shiite cleric and distant relative of Moqtada Sadr. It also included a woman who is a cousin of Moqtada Sadr; a leader of a Shiite religious party; a member of the former U.S.-appointed Governing Council; and the brother-in-law of interim President Ghazi Yawar.
The group had wanted to travel to Najaf on Monday but was unable to arrange transportation.
Concerned that its convoy might be ambushed along the way, the group was flown to a Marine base on the outskirts of Najaf by a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. Once delegation members arrived at the base, they had to wait an hour for unmarked civilian vehicles to take them into the city.
As soon as they entered the shrine, they got signals that they would not meet with Sadr. "If you have connections with the U.S. leader, you should call him and ask him to withdraw his forces a little bit so that we can bring Sayed Moqtada Sadr safely here," said Ali Smeisim, Sadr's deputy, using a religious honorific for the cleric.
"Isn't he in Najaf?" Hussein Sadr asked.
"He is -- in a secret, secure place," Smeisim said.
"The U.S. forces do not follow our orders," Hussein Sadr said. "It is not necessary for him to come. Take me to him."
"Well, it's a secret place," Smeisim responded. "As you know, we are in war conditions."
With that, the delegation was left to wait for three hours before leaving. The group gave Smeisim a communique from the national conference that calls for Sadr to dissolve the Mahdi Army, vacate the shrine and join the political process.
As the delegation members left, they publicly expressed optimism. Sadr's representatives "don't reject what came from the national conference," Hussein Sadr told reporters. "The message reached Moqtada Sadr."
As he spoke, his voice was quickly drowned out by a loud fusillade of gunfire and the emotional outburst of militiamen as a corpse shrouded in white, signifying that the deceased was a martyr, was paraded through the courtyard.
Rajaa Khozai, one of the delegates, said she hoped the group would be able to return Wednesday or Thursday and meet with Sadr. But there were no immediate plans to do so.
One of the members, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting "was not as successful" as they had hoped. "Moqtada needs to make a dramatic move for peace," the member said. "We had hoped to convey that to him directly."
As they prepared to board their helicopter to take them back to Baghdad, the members seemed resigned to a continuation of the fighting and perhaps an escalation.
"At least we showed Moqtada Sadr good faith," said Akeel Saffar, a member of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party. "Now let's see what Moqtada does."
Correspondent Karl Vick and special correspondent Omar Fekeiki in Najaf contributed to this report.
