Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...current lull in violence, the GAO contends, is like a stool that rests on three legs: the U.S. troop surge, a creaky cease-fire declared by Shi'ite militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and a U.S.-led effort to hire former insurgents to guard their neighborhoods - hardly a platform for sustainable political and social reform. Indeed, the GAO accuses the Pentagon of cherry-picking the information from Iraq that substantiates the claim of progress and ignoring more unpalatable indicators...
...another. The congressional watchdog office cites the so-called "Sons of Iraq" program, a largely Sunni group of militiamen now paid by U.S. taxpayers to keep the peace in their neighborhoods. More than 100,000 strong, the group has yet to reconcile its long-standing differences with the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. efforts to integrate these forces into the formal Iraq security forces are moving slowly, and only 14,000 militiamen have made the leap so far. What happens if the U.S. stops funding such rent-a-cops is anyone's guess, Pentagon...
...military in working with them. A former army officer, Rahman joined the new police service after Baghdad fell to coalition forces in 2003. Promoted to captain 11 months ago, he arrived in Haswah with a mandate to retake the city from the Mahdi Army militia of the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. "Every day, the Mahdi Army would kill between 3 and 12 people, just for being Sunni," Rahman says. "They didn't even hide it. They would leave the bodies right in the street. The second day I was here, five of them came to this office...
...Captain Rahman, himself a Shi'a, refused to be intimidated. He added 70 Sunni officers to what had been a 225-strong, exclusively Shi'ite force, and began aggressively patrolling the streets, in conjunction with the U.S. military, to rid the city of its criminal militias. Inevitably, he found himself accused of bias by the Mahdi Army and its media, which accused him of being an agent, alternately, of the U.S., Israel and al-Qaeda. Death threats soon followed, and his fiancee's family's home was robbed...
...While Captain Rahman was willing to endure threats and harassment from street thugs, the fate of his career, he says, was decided by Sadrists and other radical Shi'ite elements in the police chain of command. The trouble began, Rahman recalls, when his superiors urged him to lighten up on the Mahdi Army, and balance arrests of of Shi'ites by collaring more Sunnis. When he refused to arrest by quota, he says, the police department began investigating claims by Shi'ite detainees that he had abused and stolen from suspects. "None of this is true," he says, "They...