Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ground, but almost everyone involved views their presence as necessary for months, if not years, to come. "If you go anywhere in Iraq," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad, "Iraqis who hate the occupation say they don't want U.S. forces to leave." Even Shi'ite leader Ayatullah Sistani has intimated that U.S. troops are still needed to stabilize the country...
...troops have stepped back, Shi'ite and Kurd political parties are relying on their own armed militias to step in. Especially after Tuesday's bloodbath, no one feels safe enough to disarm. Gun-toting Shi'ite militiamen clad in black flooded the bomb-scarred neighborhoods of Karbala and Baghdad, setting up checkpoints and clearing the streets. Thousands of Shi'ites are under arms, divided into two major groups. One, the Jaish al-Mahdi, is aligned with the firebrand radical Muqtada al-Sadr and posts its secretive fighters at his Baghdad strongholds. "Every day people are coming in to volunteer," Sheik...
...wants them disarmed. But U.S. occupation commanders have never tried to do so by force. In fact, the U.S. has needed the militias: the peshmerga not only effectively police the north but also provide critical intelligence about infiltrators in the border areas. In the south, the Shi'ite militias have controlled restive communities that have grown disaffected with the occupation. By last week, Bremer thought he had coaxed council members to accept a constitutional pledge to blend their militias into the national security force, though the details and timing for disbanding them were among key issues left unsettled...
...marathon negotiations in the Iraqi Governing Council had culminated in unanimous approval of a surprisingly liberal draft constitution just before the dawn call to prayers on March 1. Bremer praised the much maligned council for taking a "wonderful" step toward democracy. In a triumphant news conference that morning, Shi'ite council member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie called it "a historic day in the long march toward building a new Iraq...
...Sistani's last-minute objections focused on two clauses in the basic law that give the Kurds what he apparently considers an unreasonable amount of autonomy and power. But those "technical" disputes may have opened up a fundamental struggle for political supremacy. Five of the council's 13 Shi'ite members simply failed to appear for a lunch meeting to ratify the document, and it took hours of cajoling to persuade them even to attend emergency talks well after the public ceremony should have begun. Prominent among the refuseniks was Chalabi, head of the exile Iraqi National Congress...