A feisty Muqtada al-Sadr, making his first public appearance since May, said in a TV interview aired Saturday that he was in almost total control of the Mahdi Army and that the “liberation” of Iraq was his militia’s chief goal.

The radical Shiite cleric also said the impact of the U.S. presence on Iraq was more negative than that of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, ousted in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Al-Sadr alleged that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a fellow Shiite, was as “distant” from the people of Iraq as Saddam’s Sunni-led regime. The government, he said, was “looking after its own interests, not those of the people.”

Al-Sadr’s interview with Al-Jazeera, conducted in an undisclosed location, came as violence was on the rise as part of a nationwide backlash by the Mahdi Army to the government’s attempt to crush Shiite militias and criminal gangs in the southern port of Basra.

In the interview, the 34-year-old al-Sadr appeared to have lost a great deal of weight but none of his hallmark confrontational style, frequently interrupting or correcting the interviewer.

Al-Sadr is widely thought to be spending his time between Iran’s holy city of Qom and Najaf, another holy Shiite city south of Baghdad. But nothing in the room where the interview took place offered a hint of his location.

He and the interviewer, well known Al-Jazeera reporter Ghassan Bin Jidou, sat on bamboo armed chairs with a coffee table between them. Behind al-Sadr was a brown cabinet with several volumes of Nahj al-Balagha, a work of philosophy by Imam Ali, the seventh century cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and the founder of the Shiite faith.

Al-Sadr said his withdrawal from public view was motivated in part by his desire to focus on his studies to become a mujtahid, or a religious authority.

But he made clear that he remained in charge of his political movement _ his loyalists have 30 of parliament’s 275 seats _ by personally overseeing the work of a ruling committee.

“Who among you doesn’t want me to be a mujtahid?” he said. “I have given the community five years (of my life), now I want a few years to study.”

He warned against interpreting his seclusion to be a sign of weakness and said the overwhelming majority of the Mahdi Army was “under control.” Those who broke away from the militia, he added, “always came back to the fold and repented.”

Differences between the government and al-Sadr’s supporters came to a head after hundreds of arrests by U.S. and Iraqi forces of al-Sadr supporters that U.S. commanders say are members of Iran-linked cells attacking American soldiers.

In the interview, al-Sadr said the militia’s “strategic objective” was “the liberation of Iraq from the occupier,” meaning the Americans. He outlined the aims of his political movement, saying he wants to rid Iraq of sectarian politics, prevent its breakup and create an Islamic society.

Mahdi Army commanders say their militia has been taking delivery of arms and cash from Iran, but al-Sadr sought to distance himself from the Iranians, saying he has recently told Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, that he did not approve of the “political and military interests” that Tehran pursued in Iraq.