Word: iraqi
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...same time, U.S. officials have suddenly become far more vocal than before about their unhappiness with the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki. The White House has been criticizing him in public, and both the Centcom boss, Admiral William Fallon, and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte made recent trips to Baghdad to tell al-Maliki he needs to quickly deliver some of the promised political deals on security and oil revenue with the various warring factions...
...these moves suggest--but hardly guarantee --a course correction on Iraq by September, when the patience of even GOP lawmakers will probably run out. Talk of a partial U.S. drawdown or a new acceleration of Iraqi-troop training increases with each day. A senior Administration official who participates in foreign policy meetings chose his words carefully last week: "It will be easier to execute a change in direction if the people who have to decide on it do not feel bound by things they have said and done in the past...
...military's current security push in Baghdad, known to Iraqis as Operation Fard al-Qanoon, or Imposing Law, has elicited opposite responses from Iraq's two warring sects. Shi'ite militias like the Mahdi Army have decided to lie low; their leaders went underground or on vacation to Iran. Sunni groups, especially al-Qaeda's Iraqi wing, have girded for battle. Groups associated with the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization controlled by al-Qaeda, began to confer with one another and with other Sunni groups. "The first thing we realized is that we would need lots of IEDs...
...tribes began to cluster in Diyala. In recent weeks, bombers have struck even farther north, in Mosul, Kirkuk and long-peaceful Kurdistan. But most groups remained in Baghdad and even called in reinforcements. Many al-Qaeda fighters moved from Anbar to the capital, and the Islamic Army, the largest Iraqi insurgent group, called on its fighters to rally there for a cataclysmic showdown with U.S. and Iraqi troops. They began to attack new targets, like U.S. helicopters and important bridges that connect Baghdad to the rest of the country. "These were all new kinds of attacks, and there were...
...insurgents blew up in February 2006 - have plunged Iraq into civil war. But it is brainy operatives like Abdallah who pose the most consistently lethal threat to U.S. forces. When we met for our second encounter in 15 months, he didn't seem especially worried that a massive U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown had been under way in Baghdad for the past four months - and that one of its aims was to break the back of the IED industry and roll up people like him. (Abdallah was introduced to TIME through Sunni insurgent contacts, but he did not provide his real...