Qais al-Khazali has been key to the release of Peter Moore ever since the Briton was kidnapped. The 26-year-old Shia cleric was a rising star in the Righteous League, a band of Iranian-backed Shia militants, a nascent Islamic group when he was captured by the SAS in March 2007.
Moore was seized two months later by the Righteous League, which aimed to swap him for members who had been detained during US military sweeps, then ultimately Khazali, who would emerge as the man who had seen his followers freed ahead of him. Moore was the group's most valuable pawn.
Under a deal spelled out in March, Moore and Khazali were to be the last two men released as part of a phased swap of prisoners that would be cloaked under the process of Iraqi national reconciliation. The deal proceeded according to a loose blueprint which neither Britain, the US nor Iraq wanted to acknowledge as a deal. In the eight months since, the bodies of three of Moore's guards have been handed over in return for several hundred former Shia detainees, including Righteous League members and loyalists of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The release of Moore and the handing over of Khazali from American to Iraqi custody marks a dramatic ascent for Khazali, who was once Sadr's spokesman, but now looms as the apprentice who eclipsed the master.
Khazali has risen a long way from the slums of Baghdad's Shia enclave, Sadr City and is set to soar further. Charismatic and liked by powerful members of Iran's clergy, he was a leading figure in the Righteous League, which emerged in 2006, but stayed in the shadows as a proxy of the Iranian Republican Guards elite unit, al-Quds force. Al-Quds force is charged primarily with exporting Iran's Islamic revolution byond its borders and Khazali had become central to the group's activities in Iraq by the time he was accused of helping coordinate an ambush in the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala in January 2007, which led to five US soldiers being killed.
Khazali's stature within Shia circles has risen during his time in American custody and he is expected to assume a senior leadership role within the Righteous League, possibly replacing the group's Iran-based leader, Akram al-Kabi. He is also expected to be offered a prominent role in Iraq's Shia-dominated political landscape as the Righteous League gains political legitimacy.Khazali is now in the custody of Iraqi security forces. It wil be a short incarceration. He will face an Iraqi judge within days, who will almost certainly rule that he has commited no crime under Iraqi law. Khazali will then be freed and his latest role in public life will begin.