Word: clericalization
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...Iraq's new constitution. Yet Ministries of Awqaf still exist in Kurdistan, and are still used to enforce political orthodoxy. "Instead of one big Saddam, we have a hundred small Saddams in Kurdistan," says mullah Ahmed Wahab, a member of the Iraqi parliament for the KIU and the head cleric of mosque in Erbil until he was fired by the Erbil Awqaf on the pretext that he held two jobs...
...political groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces to take on al-Sadr's militias. But since the support of al-Sadr's faction is critical to al-Jaafari's hold...
...ites don't have a majority in the parliament, and in recent days, fissures have appeared in the Shi'ite alliance. But Jaafari is backed by the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, an unpredictable political maverick with an armed militia, known as the Mahdi Army, that is widely blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence...
...Jaafari, widely disliked outside of his immediate support base, won the nomination of the Shi'ite alliance by only one vote, thanks to the intervention of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, who threw his 32 votes (among the 128 seats held by the Shi'ite alliance) behind the incumbent. Jaafari's rival in that contest was none other than Abdel Mahdi, a candidate preferred by the U.S. and a top official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with which Sadr has been engaged in a long-running battle for Shi'ite political supremacy...
...willingness among those same officials to make the real compromises needed to break the deadlock over forming a government of national unity. And the sectarian upsurge appears to have boosted the political momentum of forces outside of Khalilzad's sphere of influence, foremost among them the firebrand Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Sadr...