Word: mahdi
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...Thursday evening last week, Harbia's police force headed out in a convoy of 11 trucks to inspect the city's checkpoints. At one point the convoy stopped outside a Mahdi Army safe house, which - as a member of Harbia's forces informed him through the window - had just been raided. Another officer said the Mahdi Army even occupied one of the old police buildings until they were pushed out last month. "There are criminals and killers [in Amara] and no one arrested them before. But with this operation, we have court permission to do so," Harbia said...
Indeed, despite a low profile, Harbia says the support provided by the U.S. forces has been a key component in Amara's success. And having learned their lesson from Basra and Sadr City, Harbia says, the Mahdi Army is now on the run, and Iraqi forces are using the campaign to pave the way for smoother provincial elections in October - or as members of the Sadrist movement allege, to weaken support for Sadrist-allied candidates ahead of the elections...
...people and several local officials, most notably the city's acting deputy governor, Rafea Abdul Jabbar, an al-Sadr supporter, and at least 20 police, he says. "There was an order from the court to arrest [Jabbar] because he was cooperating with the fighters," he adds. Those Mahdi Army members who have avoided arrest have fled. Says Harbia: "Some of them have now escaped to neighboring villages, and others escaped to the marshlands." The police will follow them there, he adds...
...direct about who the target is. Amara's city police chief, Colonel Kazim Nema Mohammed al-Moussawi, is one officer who survived the operation's purge of local officials and he, unlike Harbia, has held his post since 2007. Politically, it shows. "There are militias who call themselves the Mahdi Army, but they are not the Mahdi Army," al-Moussawi says, when asked to identify a target of the operations. "The real Mahdi Army is staying in their homes...
...proper provincial elections. One of the goals is to make the election go smoothly," says Harbia. "Now with the outstanding position of al-Maliki in Basra, Amara, Mosul and Sadr City, people are looking to him as an honest and nationalist man." And are Maliki's rivals in the Mahdi Army weaker now than they were a month ago? "This is for certain," Harbia says. "They are outside...