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By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 23 - The top aide to Moktada al-Sadr, the populist Shiite cleric, said today that the interim Iraqi government was violating a peace agreement by continuing to arrest senior officials in the Sadr organization.
The aide, Ali Smesim, said at a news conference that two powerful Shiite political parties, the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were pushing for the arrests. Both parties have prominent positions in the interim government and were favored by the Americans before and after the invasion in March 2003.
Yet even as Mr. Smesim was complaining about the arrests, all the major Shiite parties, including the Sadr organization, were busily negotiating to form a powerful coalition to present a unified slate of candidates for the Jan. 30 national elections.
Separately, a spokesman for Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the Iraqi president and a Sunni Arab, said the sheik had formed a political party to run in the elections. The party is called The Iraqis, and it counts among its members the current ministers of defense and industry.
Mr. Smesim's remarks came after Iraqi police officers arrested a senior Sadr official, Sheik Hashem Abu Reghif, in the holy city of Najaf last Friday. The government said it had acted after several Iraqis filed a court complaint accusing the sheik of detaining and torturing them.
Mr. Smesim said 160 people from the Sadr organization were still in prison, despite a peace agreement reached in October under which they were to be released.
"There is a conspiracy against the Sadr people," Mr. Smesim said. "Dawa and the Supreme Council are conspiring against the Sadr movement."
Mr. Sadr has been one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Americans, igniting uprisings across the south and in Baghdad in April and August and delivering fiery sermons denouncing the American presence.
The American military routed Mr. Sadr's militia in Najaf this summer, and in October Mr. Sadr agreed to try to disarm his thousands-strong militia, the Mahdi Army, after weeks of American airstrikes in Sadr City, a sprawling slum of 2.2 million people in northeastern Baghdad that is Mr. Sadr's strongest base of support.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Sabah Kadhum, said the government would continue to arrest clerics if they incited violence. The arrests of the Sadr officials have nothing to do with political rivalries, he said.
"The government has no political stand in all of this," he said. "It's not a political matter. It's more about incitement. The government is arresting clerics who incite people."
The clash between Mr. Sadr and the two major Shiite establishment parties comes as the most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is trying to bring all the Shiite political groups together to present a unified slate of candidates for the national elections scheduled for Jan. 30. The Shiites make up at least 60 percent of the population here but have been subjugated for centuries by the Sunni Arabs, a historical trend that Ayatollah Sistani is determined to change.
The ayatollah wants to bring not only the Dawa and Supreme Council parties under one Shiite umbrella, but also Mr. Sadr, who is hugely popular among Iraqis because of his anti-American stand. Mr. Sadr has formed a loose alliance with Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile once favored by the Pentagon to rule Iraq, and the two could run in the elections together if they did not join a Shiite coalition.
When asked about whether Mr. Sadr would join a Shiite umbrella coalition, Mr. Smesim simply said that he did not want to talk about the elections. He said Dawa and the Supreme Council, both exiled during the rule of Saddam Hussein, were now "using their position in the government to persecute the Sadr movement," adding, "We're asking the Sadr followers to stay calm so a Shia war will not erupt."
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