Word: ghazaliya
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Capt. Erik Peterson knows fighters from the Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr are all around, even though he can't see them. Peterson and his men usually catch only glimpses of the Mahdi Army while on the streets of Ghazaliya, a sprawling neighborhood in western Baghdad where Shi'ite militants are pressing a campaign to drive out Sunnis. Acting on neighborhood tips, Peterson's men search suspected Mahdi Army safe houses, which often have a green ribbon hanging on the front door. Sometimes the signs are even more obvious. One house thought to be a Mahdi Army fighting...
...each other. When the Mahdi Army strikes, usually Sunnis under the protection of U.S. forces become casualties. Mosques explode. Houses burn. Mutilated bodies appear on streets that American troops claim to control. U.S. forces answer with raids on suspected Mahdi Army houses in neighborhoods like Shula, just north of Ghazaliya. Sometimes they uncover arms caches and make arrests. More often the doors they kick in lead to empty rooms where Mahdi Army fighters have left only tiny traces of themselves, such as undelivered threat letters and spent bullet casings...
...Ghazaliya, battle lines are already forming. The Mahdi Army began a southward push through the neighborhood in the summer, clearing Sunnis from the area house by house (see story). U.S. forces hope to halt the Mahdi Army's advance, which shows no signs of slowing. American soldiers are throwing up roadblocks around the front-line area in an effort to stop southward incursions by Shi'ite death squads using cars. Platoons patrol the area in Humvees and on foot as well trying to deter both sides from fighting. But the patrols can only cover so much ground, and gunfights often...
...pace of events in Ghazaliya and other violent neighborhoods in Baghdad these days makes the policy debate on Iraq in Washington seem like a glacial process doomed to produce a strategy immediately rendered outdated. Even now, much of Washington appears to be clinging to the belief that the killing across Iraq is not a civil war, since the violence has unfolded in fluid patterns defying conventional notions of a battlefield divided by opposing forces. But that now is changing. The war is down to territorial street fights in places like Ghazaliya, where Cartee and the men in his platoon...
...says bullets fly into the neighborhood almost daily. Cartee visits Hamed frequently, always urging him not to take matters into his own hands. U.S. troops try to help Hamed by keeping up patrols in the area and raiding safe houses of the Mahdi Army - which denies any operations in Ghazaliya. But the U.S. raids often come to nothing. Shi'ite militants have a knack for disappearing before U.S. forces can nab them. And the U.S. patrols aren't omnipresent. Much of the time the sheik...