Word: cleric
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Until then, most Iraqis had never heard of him, and didn't know what to expect from this phlegmatic figure in ill-fitting suits. Maliki didn't help matters by constantly shifting his position on key issues. One moment he supported the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; the next, he was ordering Iraqi forces to smash Sadr's militia. One minute he was being described by President Bush as "my man"; the next, he was fulminating against U.S. interference in Iraqi politics. "It's like every six months there's a new Maliki," says a Western official...
...attacks on election day. With the vehicle ban, suicide bombers on foot and rocket or mortar fire pose the biggest threats. But so far there has been little sign that Iraq's militants are organizing a bloody show of force. The largest Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, is essentially dormant these days. And Sunni insurgent elements in previously volatile areas such as Anbar and Diyala provinces appear to be, by and large, staying their hand in the expectation that sympathetic Sunni politicians - who boycotted the last provincial election, in 2005 - will take a number...
Indeed, al-Sadr's once formidable movement appears to be at its nadir, with the cleric himself scarcely a presence in Iraqi politics these days and his political bloc pushed to the sidelines of the provincial elections on Jan. 31. A series of military defeats at the hands of toughened Iraqi security forces plus political missteps over the past year by al-Sadr and his followers have left the future of the mass movement in doubt. And without a solid showing of popular support in the coming vote, the Sadrists appear set to lose what remains of the enormous political...
...veracity of the government poll is questionable, but the results appear to be in step with popular sentiment toward the Sadrists in Baghdad, where many have come to see the cleric's followers as thugs and opportunists. "I am not satisfied with the ideology of these people," says Rasim Hassan Haikel, a Shi'ite shopkeeper in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Huriya, a longtime Mahdi Army stronghold...
...politicians has escalated. Hassan Zaidan al-Luhaibi, a Sunni leader and former member of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, was killed by a suicide bomber on Jan. 18, just two days after Shi'ite candidate Haitham Kadhim al-Husaini was fatally shot. The murders come as influential Shi'ite cleric Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani has urged Iraqis to vote despite dissatisfaction with previous elections...