Word: allawi
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...being held four months from now increasingly remote. While U.S. and Iraqi officials continue to insist that the elections will go ahead on schedule, they acknowledge the difficulty presented by the fact that some of the major urban centers of the Sunni heartland are in insurgent hands. Prime Minister Allawi's proposal that a poll could be held without voting in those areas where violence precludes it could essentially break up the country. Already the Kurdish northeast is showing every intention of cutting ties to an increasingly chaotic center, and allowing an election without the participation of much...
...Baghdad, 11 slain by another in Baquba, 8 dead in a clash between U.S. troops and insurgents in Ramadi - and those were just the major incidents. U.S. casualties have risen every month since the June hand-over of political authority to the interim government of prime minister Iyad Allawi, and the pattern of confrontation is not encouraging. In April, the U.S. military fought insurgents in Fallujah, then battled Moqtada Sadr's men in Najaf in June. The U.S. returned there in August for a second, inconclusive battle and then, in September, found itself once again bombing Fallujah in preparation...
...fundamental challenge in transferring security responsibility to Iraqi forces is political. The U.S. must convince Iraqi personnel that they're fighting for Iraq, rather than fighting under the command of an unpopular foreign army. While the administration may have convinced its domestic audience that by transferring political authority to Allawi they have essentially handed the Iraqis back their country, they have yet to persuade many Iraqis of the same idea. Allawi is a U.S. appointee, and his power is based almost entirely on the backing of the U.S. military - a tough assignment in a country where even opinion polls commissioned...
...upstart cleric, whose Mahdi Army was allowed to withdraw intact, has reneged on agreements before, and this latest tactical retreat, after hundreds of his men had been killed, left him and his surviving militiamen free to fight another day. The interim Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had repeatedly vowed to crush al-Sadr's illegal army but quickly acceded to a plan that would spare the shrine from assault. Al-Sadr, said Minister of State Qassim Dawoud, is now "as free as any Iraqi citizen to do whatever he would like in Iraq." But there's surely...
...officials and Middle East experts warn that a failure to crush the Mahdi Army will encourage militants across the country to multiply. Other political and ethnic factions have fielded armed militias since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and many wield more authority than Allawi's government. Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni says the Americans who ran Iraq after the invasion are to blame for the unchecked growth of the militias "because they didn't have a clear policy on how to deal with them back when they were easier to put down...