It is the hottest show in town, and given that the town is Baghdad it is a surprisingly bold satire.The storyline is of hapless ordinary citizens having to pay endless bribes to a kleptocracy, while courtesans use high official connections to enjoy the good life. In the hot and stuffy theatre with its peeling walls and plumes of acrid cigarette smoke, the audience howl with laughter at the slapstick.Then comes the ending: Baghdad is wiped away in a nuclear attack And it does not seem all that funny any more.. In the race to occupy the seat of power in Baghdad, few would put their money on the wraith-like figure of 63-year old Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. As head of Iraq’s largest opposition group, Ayatollah al-Hakim never tires of warning the United States that its military presence in post-war Iraq will not be welcome, and any attempt to install a Pentagon general to rule Baghdad may be met with a “religious war”.From his headquarters in Tehran he makes clear there is no place for even a temporary US military government in Baghdad, along the lines of General Douglas MacArthur’s in post-war Japan.

“Iraqi opposition forces can form a democracy,” Ayatollah al-Hakim says. “But if the United States installs an American general, this is against the idea of democracy.” Any attempt to establish a long-term American occupation of Iraq would set the Middle East ablaze, he says.At Friday prayers, Ayatollah al-Hakim sat in the VIP area surrounded by the most conservative members of Iran’s ruling elite. Amid chants of “Death to America” and “God is Great” the exiled cleric touches his forehead to a piece of sacred earth taken from his birthplace, the holy Iraqi city of Najaf.Ayatollah al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), is among the highest-ranking Shia clergymen who wears the black turban of a sayyid, indicating he is a direct descendent of the Prophet. He is also the commander-in-chief of a formidable fighting force which is expected to move on Iraq from its bases in Iran as soon as the US-led war begins.For 20 years Ayatollah al-Hakim’s militia has been conducting a guerrilla war against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In 1991 they came pouring over the border from Iran when President George Bush Snr urged Iraqis to topple Saddam while his forces were on the run at the end of the Gulf War. Soon posters of the cleric and the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were appearing on walls in Basra, the epicentre of the revolt against Saddam.The prospect of an Islamic revolution in Iraq terrified manySunni muslims, Kurds, Christians and secular Iraqis. Fears the uprising was being orchestrated from Iran was deeply destabilising for the US and its allies who feared militant Islam far more than Saddam Hussein, the man they had secretly armed for his war against Iran for more than a decade. Now his followers, numbering about 30,000 and heavily armed courtesy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, are poised to begin their own offensive against Iraqi forces once the opportunity presents itself.