The catastrophic failure to reconstruct also shared direct responsibility for the most lethal form of blowback—the dangerous rise of religious fundamentalism and sectarian conflict. When the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic services, including security, the mosques and local militias filled the vacuum. The young Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr proved particularly adept at exposing the failures of Bremer’s privatized reconstruction by running his own shadow reconstruction in Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, earning himself a devoted following.
