Word: mahdi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iran knows something about the kidnapping of the five British contractors on May 31. The sophistication of the attack - the kidnappers arrived at the Shi'a-run Ministry of Finance in 40 police vehicles - suggests the Iranians may even have been in on the planning. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the group that most likely executed the kidnapping, answers to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The theory is that the kidnapping was in retaliation for the British killing of a Sadr commander in Basra on May 25 and an American attack on the Mahdi Army in Sadr city...
From the beginning, however, the surge strategy relied heavily on the idea that the increased presence of U.S. forces would deter sectarian violence. That worked, for a time. The Mahdi Army, the largest Shi'ite militia, tacitly agreed to suspend its campaign of murder and intimidation against Sunnis as the surge got rolling in March and April. For two months, Shi'ite death squads largely checked themselves, even while Sunni extremists pressed a campaign of bombings that left 617 Iraqis dead in March and 634 dead in April. (In May, the fatalities from bombings fell...
...Although no group has as yet claimed responsibility, first suspicion is bound to fall on the Mahdi Army, the dreaded Shi'ite militia; the snatch bore some of the group's hallmarks, including the use of police vehicles and uniforms. Iraq's minority Sunnis routinely complain that the Iraqi police force often acts as a front for Shi'ite militias, especially the Mahdi Army...
...commonplace. The most spectacular of these attacks occurred last November, when scores of men in police commando uniforms - and driving vehicles with police markings - stormed into an office of the Ministry of Higher Education, kidnapping 150 people. Most were subsequently released, and the operation was attributed to a Mahdi Army warlord named Abu Dera'a. But many Iraqis believe the police was complicit in the kidnapping...
...Over 200 foreigners and possibly tens of thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since the fall of Saddam Hussein. But it is unusual for the Mahdi Army to kidnap foreigners - that tends to be the work of Sunni terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. And Shi'ite militias typically don't target ministries run by their fellow-sectarians. The Ministry of Higher Educaton was run by a Sunni. But the Finance Minister is a prominent Shi'ite, Bayan Jabr Solagh. What is more, he's the former Interior Minister under whose watch the Iraqi police was thoroughly infiltrated...