Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what happened? For the first time since the war began, U.S. forces had locked down the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, haven to the militias and death squads loyal to rebel Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Looking for a missing U.S. soldier, the Americans cordoned off much of Sadr City, preventing hundreds of killers from slipping out. On Oct. 24, the daily murder rate fell roughly 50%. It stayed down for more than a week, until Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded that the U.S. end the blockade around Sadr City. After the U.S. pulled...
...Iraq in the months ahead, with 17,500 of them deployed to Baghdad, the bleeding heart of the country's civil war. In his Jan. 10 speech announcing the surge, President Bush said U.S. troops would have "a green light" to go into the lairs of powerful Shi'ite militias like al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which until now have been left largely untouched by them. That hands-off policy has turned Sadr City into Baghdad's ground zero: a bristling hothouse of sectarian hatred that exists outside the control of U.S. and Iraqi authorities. The success or failure...
...Sadr seldom appears in Sadr City. He normally resides in the southern Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, where U.S. forces battled the Mahdi Army in 2004. U.S. troops stage occasional raids in the sector against Mahdi Army operatives, which the Pentagon now considers a greater threat to security than al-Qaeda. But al-Maliki has consistently stopped American forces from waging an all-out assault on the Mahdi Army or its leadership out of fear of alienating his political base. "The Iraqi leadership has prevented us from targeting some leaders," says a senior military official. "Our understanding is that...
Still, Administration officials won't say whether they intend to take on the Mahdi Army immediately. Retired four-star Army General Jack Keane, who has been advising the White House, says the U.S. plans to focus first on stabilizing mixed Sunni-Shi'ite neighborhoods, which, in theory, would bolster confidence in both communities and give al-Maliki the political space to take on al-Sadr's militias on his own. "After a number of weeks, Maliki will get the leverage ... to persuade the Shi'a militia leaders to get off the offensive," Keane says...
...worst-case scenario would be a dragged-out battle that produced high civilian casualties and ignited anti-U.S. anger among Shi'ite masses--just as the battle of Fallujah did among Sunnis in 2004. Sadr's forces could also melt away and bet that the U.S. will pull back again. It's not a bad gamble: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says the surge isn't likely to last past August, in part because of waning public support for the war. On a just-completed trip to Baghdad, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh told al-Maliki that Americans...