Word: ghazaliya
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Cartee doubts the Sunni families barricading themselves in his sector can hold out much longer. Shi'ite militants thought to be from the Mahdi Army have mounted an aggressive campaign since this summer to clear Sunnis from the northern end of Ghazaliya, a formerly posh neighborhood in western Baghdad. The cleansing push has moved steadily southward, gaining ground house by house, day by day. Cartee says Mahdi Army fighters typically give Sunni families they threaten in Ghazaliya just 24 hours to leave their homes, which are then handed to Shi'ite families. Anyone who defies the deadline risks death...
...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the policy debate on Iraq in Washington seem like a glacial process doomed to produce a strategy immediately rendered outdated.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...
...While there has been no claim of responsibility, suspicions immediately fell on al Qaeda in Iraq, and their Sunni allies in the insurgency. Shi?ite reactions were swift and violent. Mobs from the predominantly Shi'ite Shu'lah neighborhood in western Baghdad attacked Sunni mosques in Ghazaliya, a nearby Sunni area. Gunmen were out on the streets of Sadr City, home base for rebel cleric-and parliamentary power broker-Moqtada al-Sadr. In Basra, there were reports of heavy street fighting between Sunni and Shi'ite gunmen. Elsewhere, Sunni political party offices were attacked...