Word: badr
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...masked man intoned, was sanctioned by Islam's holiest texts. "Has the time not come for you to lift the sword, which the master of the Messengers [Muhammad] was sent with?" al-Zarqawi asked. "The Prophet ... has ordered to cut off the heads of some of the prisoners of Badr ... He is our example...
...Prophet Muhammad's life, called hadiths, record the execution--by what method is debated--of a tribe that had lived among Muslims and then betrayed them. Al-Zarqawi's specific bid to sacralize Berg's slaughter rests on an allusion to Muhammad's great victory on the battlefield of Badr. According to some hadiths, Muhammad was left wondering what to do with the resulting prisoners. This, the texts claimed, was the context for God's Koranic statement "As to prisoners of war, we have not sent you as an oppressor of the land." One 10th century gloss further asserted that...
...shoulder with Americans to root them out. But "illegal militia" is a slippery and subjective category in Iraq, where every major political party has its own armed formation. The Kurdish "peshmerga" forces that fought alongside the U.S. from the beginning have been "legal" all along; the Iran-trained Badr brigade was initially regarded with hostility by the U.S. but is now recognized as an important force for stability in places such as Najaf...
...from the U.S. The most logical way to do that would be to extend the Fallujah principle to the entire country: ask the American military to stand down and turn security over to local militias--Baathists in the Sunni triangle, the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north, the Shi'ite Badr Brigade in the south. This would be dreadful long-term policy, an open invitation to civil war. But would the Bush Administration oppose it? Possibly not, on recent evidence, especially if it produced the appearance of calm by November (as it already has in Fallujah). Several Kerry aides said they...
...flanks in the Shiite community in the face not only of clerical exasperation with his provocative stance but also rival political-military factions. Chief among them is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leaders sit on the IGC but whose 10,000-man Badr Brigade militia was trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. SCIRI has begun to challenge Sadr's men for control of the streets of Najaf. The mounting tension among rival Shiite elements there may have the look of a potential civil war, but it might just as easily be the opening salvoes...