Word: mahdi
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Prospects for al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, and the political figures who stood at the edge of it have steadily dimmed since last spring, when government forces of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emerged as the de facto victors in battles with the Mahdi Army across southern Iraq and Baghdad. Weeks of fighting in the early months of 2008 ended in a stalemate. Since then, Iraqi security forces have rounded up scores of Sadrists with the help of U.S. troops, effectively hollowing out the movement's street power and political influence. Meanwhile, the vast popularity that al-Sadr...
...with popular sentiment toward the Sadrists in Baghdad, where many have come to see the cleric's followers as thugs and opportunists. "I am not satisfied with the ideology of these people," says Rasim Hassan Haikel, a Shi'ite shopkeeper in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Huriya, a longtime Mahdi Army stronghold...
...lost the suitcase on my first trip to Iraq eight months ago, as Iraqi and U.S. forces clashed with radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, I would have been forced to wear whatever our male Iraqi security guards picked out without me. Last March, I arrived to an onslaught of rockets and mortars fired at the nearby Green Zone, along with retaliatory coalition air strikes and the near constant thunder of helicopter blades overhead. As with other foreign reporters, my movements were always calculated, and I often donned a long black abaya and head scarf. But this time...
...removed from the room. Little has emerged about the journalist, a correspondent for al-Baghdadiya, a satellite TV channel that broadcasts from Cairo. According to some reports, he was kidnapped by an unidentified group in November 2007 and rescued by anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. It's not known if al-Zaidi has any political affiliation with al-Sadr's group. His employer has demanded his immediate release, but according to the Prime Minister's media adviser, Yasid Majid, al-Zaidi will be charged with insulting the Iraqi state and sent to trial...
Undeterred, some Shi'ite scholars trawled through ancient texts to find proof and came up with increasingly far-fetched theories linking the rise of Obama to important Shi'ite figures like the Imam Ali. Some pointed to a prophecy sometimes attributed to Ali that the arrival of the Mahdi - a messiah-like figure who, Shi'ites believe, will ultimately defeat evil - will be presaged by the appearance of a messenger, a tall black man who will rule the West. Others read meaning into Obama's name. In Persian, O-ba-ma means "He's with us," and Barack Hussein...