NAJAF, Iraq – I had waited a long time to meet the miserable Muqtada al-Sadr.

This young Shiite cleric is the son of the revered Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, who was murdered in 1999 by Saddam. Young Sadr is a baby-faced youth who wears the black turban of a descendant of the prophet. He has no religious standing but defers to a hard-line mentor in Tehran, Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, who espouses Iranian-style clerical rule.

Many believe that Haeri is pushing young Sadr to provoke the Americans. Last week, Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia ambushed a U.S. patrol in Baghdad and killed two American soldiers. The top U.S. commander here has threatened military action against Sadr’s forces.

But I hold a special grievance against Muqtada, as Iraqis commonly call him. Iraqis tell me he was responsible for the brutal murder of a unique Iraqi cleric, Sayyid Abdul Majid al-Khoei.

A moderate who believed in separation of mosque and government, Khoei returned from exile to Iraq in April to try to broker a new relationship between America and Shiite Muslims. As the son of another revered cleric, Khoei was a rival of young Sadr’s, with a very different philosophy.

I knew Khoei for years before he was stabbed to death in April in Najaf near its holiest shrine. This week, I finally came face to face with Muqtada, at a bizarre news conference on the roof of a Najaf elementary school.

Wearing his long robes and a petulant expression, the cleric proclaimed he was setting up a new Iraqi government that would be validated by public demonstrations. He claimed to espouse “nonviolence.” But he went on to say that “any Shiite who cooperates with occupation forces is not a Shiite.”

He clearly wants to provoke U.S. forces into clashes, and then become the leader of those discontented with occupation. I believe, however, that he will self-destruct – if the U.S. military handles him carefully and in full cooperation with the Shiite religious establishment, known as the Hawza.

For it is not just America that Muqtada has challenged. His troops, drawn from the lumpen of Baghdad’s huge Shiite slum, Sadr City, have threatened the top Shiite clerics and provoked an internal Shiite civil war.

On one side is the Hawza, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose clerics have until now tolerated the U.S. presence. They expect that elections will soon give the Shiite majority in Iraq the power it was denied by Saddam. On the other side is Sadr, who represents a more radical Shiite strain nurtured among the urban poor by decades of Saddam’s repression.

This week, Sadr’s self-proclaimed Mahdi Army tried to seize control of the holy Shiite shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas in the city of Karbala. A firefight ensued between Sadr followers holed up in his headquarters and fighters from a Shiite political party loyal to Ayatollah Sistani.

I visited Sadr’s headquarters in Karbala, a tightly guarded, one-story compound and attached mosque, where fresh bullet holes peppered the whitewashed walls. Tall, bearded Shaikh Khalid al-Kaddemi, who runs Sadr’s office, assured me that the Mahdi Army had been attacked by Sistani’s forces. The citizens and merchants of Karbala told a very different tale.

They said they were fed up with Sadr’s followers, who were trying to take over this town by force. Karbala, whose skyline is dominated by the gold domes and brightly lit minarets of the shrines, was filled this week with Shiite pilgrims – black-shrouded Iraqi and Iranian women, Indian Shiites in pastel orange, pink and yellow tunics and pants. Yet Sadr’s men started a firefight in the center of town.

“The citizens of Najaf and Karbala don’t like the Mahdi Army,” said Abu Jassem, proprietor of a chicken rotisserie restaurant overlooking the shrines. Neither do the clerics of the Hawza. In Najaf, the offices of the chief clerics were shut up tight as a safety precaution against Sadr or his allies.

There is a commonality of interest here between the Shiite clerics and U.S. forces. Sadr must be curbed. But just as local fighters curbed the threat in Karbala, Shiite leaders know best how Sadr should be handled. Nothing would be worse than to have U.S. forces shooting up holy cities, or invading Shiite slums.

When it comes to muzzling Muqtada al-Sadr, U.S. officials must listen closely to what Iraqis say.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.