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...past year many in Iraq's Shi'ite majority have chafed under the U.S. occupation--at the lack of jobs and the frustrating pace of the promised transition to Iraqi rule, a transition that promised to bring them to power. That simmering discontent last week turned into a full, chaos-inducing boil. Following a call to arms by a radical, power-hungry cleric named Muqtada al-Sadr, thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites declared war against a military that had freed them from a heinous dictator. In cities across Iraq, Shi'ite militants united behind the goal of casting...
...faces a two-front insurgency. It stretches from restive cities west of Baghdad, such as Fallujah and Ramadi, to the Shi'ite provinces of southern Iraq, where until last week the U.S. believed it enjoyed the grudging support of a populace grateful that Saddam sits in a jail cell, awaiting trial for his crimes. There are signs that the siege in Fallujah and the resistance among those loyal to al-Sadr have united the traditionally fractious Shi'ites and Sunnis against a common enemy. In Baghdad half of those who joined a caravan carrying supplies to the mostly Sunni residents...
...officials do not believe the uprising will turn into a nationwide insurrection. They say the Shi'ite militia numbers only a few thousand and describe leaders, including al-Sadr, as two-bit thugs. All that may be true. But the inability of the U.S., its coalition partners and their Iraqi allies to prevent the outbreak of mayhem showed that, a full year into the occupation, Iraq is nowhere close to being under control. After Iraqi police forces were overrun by al-Sadr's men, the Iraqi Interior Minister resigned at the behest of U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer...
...message to the insurgents: there would be no retreat. It was, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, a "test of wills." General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) responsible for Iraq, told Bush in a video-conference call last Friday that his troops were not seeing Sunni-Shi'ite cooperation in any structural or systematic way. In the south, U.S. forces reclaimed the city of Kut from the short-lived control of al-Sadr's militia. But Pentagon officials warned that the conflict against al-Sadr and his supporters might drag on: the Shi'ite festival of Arbaeen...
Among the many questions that remain unanswered is whether the horror in Fallujah represented an isolated spasm of mob violence or a more corrosive, widespread streak of anti-American hatred. On Saturday, Shi'ite followers of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr marched and burned American flags, promising if asked to be the hand of Hamas and Hizballah in Iraq. But galling as the images in Fallujah were, U.S. commanders say the city and the surrounding area remain a uniquely difficult problem, with little bearing on what's happening in the rest of the country. The military continues to believe that...