Word: mahdi
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...statement was the first hopeful sign of a possible end to the conflict that the Iraqi and American governments originally billed as a battle against criminal gangs in Basra, but that escalated into a full-fledged fight with the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest militia. On Saturday the Iraqi government, the Mahdi Army and U.S. forces all escalated the fight, and the militia's seven-month-old cease-fire seemed on the brink of total collapse...
...Moqtada al-Sadr stopped the Mahdi Army's activities for six months, and then extended that for six more months," Haider al-Jaberi, a member of Sadr's political committee in the holy city of Najaf, told reporters on Saturday. "But the Iraqi government didn't respect that decision...
...relative of the Iraqi civilian spokesman for security, Tahsin al-Sheikhli, who was kidnapped from his Baghdad home on Thursday, told TIME that the family suspected breakaway elements of the Mahdi Army to be behind the kidnapping. The gunmen also beat members of Sheikhli's family, killed three of his bodyguards - also from the Mahdi Army - and set the home on fire. So far no demands have been made...
...Iraqi security forces against militiamen in Basra is increasingly drawing in the United States, both militarily and politically. U.S. air power was used in the key port city for the first time on Thursday night in support of Iraqi forces trying to dislodge fighters of Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army, and U.S. troops clashed with Mahdi Army militants in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City on Friday. President Bush, speaking in Washington, called the fight a "defining moment" for Iraq, but the clashes could have important implications for the U.S. mission there...
...source in Iraq's Ministry of Information told TIME that Sheikhli's bodyguards were overwhelmed by a dozen men armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles. Two of the bodyguards were killed and one wounded in the fighting; Sheikhli's family believes his captors are members of a Mahdi Army splinter group. With reporting by Abigail Hauslohner/Baghdad