Word: mahdi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...public in several weeks, and he has not kept up his usual practice of leading Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in Kufa. Now U.S. officials are claiming the firebrand anti-American cleric fled to Iran two or three weeks ago, along with several commanders of his dreaded Mahdi Army militia. But senior Sadr officials in Baghdad have dismissed those claims as propaganda, and maintain he is still in his Najaf headquarters...
...majority of EFP attacks, the officials said, came from "rogue" elements of Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army. The officials would not go further than that to associate the leader of the powerful Shi'a militia to Iran. This is the same line the U.S. walks when attributing militia violence and death squad murders to the Mahdi Army. Sadr is the highest-profile - and likely the most effective single opponent - of the American presence in Iraq. But he is also a power broker in Iraq's government and a key supporter of the Iraqi prime minister. It is therefore politically tricky...
...face down an armed uprising by a group that allegedly had a lot in common with the Branch Davidians - a millenarian cult led by a charismatic messiah figure who believed that it could bring about the end of the world. Indeed, the man who was hailed as the Mahdi - an Islamic figure who arrives with the cosmic apocalypse - wasn't just defending a military encampment in the holy city of Najaf from the Iraqi Army. He and his followers were protecting land that had been the cult's home for well over a decade...
...though it is difficult to untangle reality from stories designed to make the defeated sect look bad. The government now says that it found a pool underneath a large tent where sect members engaged in orgies - in the apparent belief that immoral behavior would hasten the advent of the Mahdi...
...more and more likely that the enemy in the orchards outside Najaf was a cult-like offshoot of Shi'a Islam - men and women who believed the violence in Iraq was not just cataclysmic but apocalyptic. Iraqi officials say they rallied around a man who claimed to be the Mahdi - in Shi'a Islam, a spiritual leader who vanished in the late 9th century and whose return presages a final battle between good and evil. (Sunni Muslims have a quite different conception of the Mahdi, a redemptive figure who will walk the earth to establish peace in the world prior...