Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mehdi Army, like Hizballah, is an arm of a mass popular movement rooted in Shi'ite mosques but providing a measure of security and welfare. Like Hizballah it has ties with Iran, although unlike Hizballah - which was actually created by Iran - Sadr's links are more recent. While his key rival for Iraqi Shi'ite support, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (currently the largest party in Prime Minister Maliki's coalition), was based in Iran during the Saddam years, Sadr's movement remained inside Iraq operating underground. And in the chaos that followed the toppling...
...current U.S. thinking, sectarian conflict is considered, if anything, more dangerous than the anti-U.S. insurgency; as a result, disarming the Shi'ite militias today is given equal priority to defusing the insurgency by making political concessions to the Sunnis. Prime Minister Maliki's government stands committed to both objectives, although progress has been negligible on both fronts. Ambassador Patey's Hizballah reference, however, is notable, not only for the similarities between the two movements, but also for the connection it draws between the crisis in Lebanon and the fate of Iraq...
...disarming Sadr's army may prove, if anything, even more difficult than disarming Hizballah in Lebanon. That's because the three-year campaign of terror against Shi'ite civilians by Sunni insurgents has led the community to see its militias, rather than the central government, as its only protection. As that violence escalates, the likelihood diminishes that these communities will support any effort to forcefully dismantle the militias. Nor can an agreement to disarm be easily orchestrated by removing the insurgent threat, since the branch of the insurgency responsible for targeting the Shi'ites is led by al-Qaeda...
...Israel's campaign against Hizballah in Lebanon, moreover, has inflamed Shi'ite public opinion against the Coalition. Sadr has warned that his movement will not stand by passively in the face of attacks on Lebanon, and the popularity of that sentiment among Shi'ites was highlighted by the fact that more moderate voices such as Prime Minister Maliki and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani echoed Sadr's harsh criticism of the U.S.-British opposition to an immediate cease-fire...
...Moving against the Shi'ite militias has always been a difficult proposition, but doing so at a point where Shi'ite public opinion is so openly hostile to the Coalition may be entirely implausible. Indeed, the key to disarming those militias is more likely to lie in a new political agreement with their party bosses, in conjunction with a wider national-unity power-sharing agreement capable of shrinking the base of the Sunni insurgency. But the mounting sectarian violence and the passions stoked by Lebanon make the prospects for such a deal right now more remote than ever...