Word: baghdad
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...arrival of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who came to Baghdad on Saturday with a congressional delegation, set off a now-familiar cycle of reaction in the Iraqi capital. First there was buzz around the city about flight delays from Baghdad International Airport, which goes into lockdown when VIPs land or takeoff. Since no dust storms were grounding flights, anyone traveling could have assumed some American bigwig was heading in. But when local TV reported the visitor was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there was a collective shrug of the kind you might expect from Republicans catching a glimpse of her somewhere...
...Washington has any say in the matter: This week, according to two U.S. officials, America's diplomats and military liaisons were told to cut off ties with Chalabi. One official said the instruction came in anticipation of Chalabi being taken off the Baghdad Services Committee, adding that if the Iraqi government is removing him from his position, then there is no need to contact him or provide support. NBC News first reported the rebuke on its website, citing American concern over Chalabi's contacts with Iran. A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad would not elaborate on the order...
...Allegations about Chalabi's ties to Iran are not new. His Baghdad compound was raided in 2004 when U.S. officials suspected he had warned Iranian intelligence that the U.S. had broken its communications codes. A subsequent FBI investigation led to no charges, and Chalabi was never questioned in the matter, even when he traveled to the U.S. in 2005 as a deputy prime minister of Iraq. Since then, U.S. contact with Chalabi has been mostly limited to his efforts to bring power generators and water trucks to the most neglected neighborhoods of Baghdad...
...position had provided Chalabi with some political capital, and a little publicity. His political organization, the Iraqi National Congress, recently launched a weekly newspaper dedicated to citizens' complaints about the lack of services around Baghdad. An op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on April 12 wrote that "arguably [Chalabi] has, more than anyone in the country, evolved a detailed sense of what ails Baghdad and how to fix things...
...Over the past six months, Chalabi has focused a lot of attention on delivering services to Sadr City, the northeast Baghdad Shi'ite slum that is a major stronghold of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. To do this required close coordination with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has over the past month been locked in fierce battles with U.S. and Iraqi government forces. The U.S. alleges that elements of the Mahdi Army have received training and weapons from Iran. "We talk to the Madhi Army," says Chalabi spokesman Mohammad Hassan al-Moussawi, "because the Madhi Army...