Word: ite
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...become a ritual. Each Friday hundreds of young, impoverished Shi'ite men would pile into beat-up Kia minibuses in a Baghdad slum known as Sadr City. They would travel the 90-mile highway to the holy city of Kufa to lay their prayer mats inside the mosque, jockeying for a spot as close to the podium as possible. Whenever the white car carrying their leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, came into view, the scene would turn into pandemonium. Bodyguards with Kalashnikov ma-chine guns would struggle to carve out a path so al-Sadr could reach a platform beneath...
...border--remain untamed. In recent months U.S. forces have curtailed patrols and pulled back to bases outside Iraq's inner cities, leaving most of southern Iraq in the hands of its coalition partners. It has also turned over the policing of urban areas like Baghdad's seething Shi'ite slum Sadr City to overmatched Iraqi security forces, which is why nowhere near enough U.S. forces were available to respond when al-Sadr's militia made its move...
...last week Rumsfeld acknowledged for the first time that he might be forced to break his pledge not to keep any U.S. soldiers in Iraq for more than 12 months. With the coalition desperate to quash the Shi'ite insurgency before it spreads, the Pentagon says it will probably delay shipping out some 25,000 soldiers--mostly members of the 1st Armored Division--who have been in the country for a year. Because of scheduled troop rotations, there are 135,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, up from 120,000 several weeks ago. An Army officer at Centcom insists that delaying...
...least a symbolic transfer of power, even if a significant number of troops remain and real authority will mostly be wielded out of a new 3,000-person U.S. embassy. Officials believe delaying the transition would only further enrage Iraqis, including, critically, the country's most revered Shi'ite leader, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, whose support the U.S. needs more than ever as it tries to rein in the upstart al-Sadr. "June 30 is a good date," says Rend al-Rahim Francke, Iraq's diplomatic representative to the U.S. "It is long overdue...
When political ambition coincides with popular disillusion, the mix can be combustible. And so it proved last week in the mean streets of Sadr City, a neighborhood filled with poor, disgruntled Shi'ites, when the young rabble-rousing cleric decided to roll the dice. Since the day a year ago when U.S. soldiers pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein, symbolizing the regime's fall, al-Sadr has railed against the American occupation. He built up a network of civilian supporters and recruited fighters for his Mahdi Army, named for the 12th, or Hidden, Imam, whom Shi'ites believe will...