Ayatollah Mohammad Bakr al-Hakim, who was killed on Friday in a car bomb attack in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, was one of the most influential Shia leaders of his generation and a consistent opponent of Saddam Hussein.

During Saddam's repeated crackdowns on the majority Shiite community, it was Bakr al- Hakim who provided the moral and spiritual leadership that his community needed to sustain the struggle against the Baathist regime in Baghdad.

Less well known is Bakr al-Hakim's enormous contribution to the resistance among the legendary Marsh Arabs, whose ancestry goes back to pre-Biblical times, and who provided some of the fiercest resistance to Saddam's forces in and around their hideouts within the reeds of southern Iraq.

It was during a prolonged visit to the marshlands in and around Basra a decade ago that I first encountered Bakr al-Hakim. Already a living legend, the then 53-year-old cleric had arranged to have me smuggled in from across the Iranian border so that I could witness for myself the daily attacks by Saddam's army on the marsh Arab communities.

We travelled for the best part of a week in a series of flat bottomed boats, Bakr al-Hakim always seated at the prow, always indifferent to the dangers of a Saddam commando group lurking around the corner.

A man of deep religious convictions, he was not a religious fanatic and never tried to impose his views on those from other faiths and communities.

He had an impassive countenance that never betrayed the anguish he felt from the deaths of his five brothers and numerous other relatives, all killed on Saddam's orders.

Supporters said the content and delivery of this quiet-spoken man's speech was like the speech of angels. During our many conversations in the middle of the marshes, he came across as a proud Iraqi nationalist, a solicitous and caring host and a man of vision.

Where many Iraqis had convinced themselves that they would have to live under Saddam and his successors for decades to come, Bakr al-Hakim argued the opposite. He told me on many occasions that Saddam's regime was the essence of pure evil and divine justice would bring it to an end sooner rather than later.

This year's US-led attack against Saddam's forces was not exactly what Bakr al-Hakim had anticipated, but it brought about the result he had hoped for and which he believed ushered in a new dawn of hope for all Iraqis to build a better and more decent country.

Imprisoned and tortured in Iraq during the 1970s, Bakr al-Hakim fled to Iran in 1980 where he founded the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It was Sciri's armed wing, the Badr brigade, that subsequently waged a low-level war of ambushes, sabotage, and assassinations against the Saddam's regime.

Uniquely for Bakr al-Hakim, he attracted the support of his fellow ayatollahs in Tehran, as well as assistance from the Western world.

When he returned to Iraq in triumph in May last, more than two decades after he was forced into exile, he was welcomed back to his birthplace in Najaf by thousands of fellow Shia Muslim supporters.

There is speculation that the car bomb which killed him on Friday was the work of religious rivals in Najaf. But it is far more likely that Bakr al-Hakim was the victim of Saddam loyalists still active in Iraq who were determined to deny him
the chance of building the free, democratic and just Iraq that he had campaigned for throughout his life.

Complete coverage of the Iraq war