Word: mahdi
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...that as the violence increases, "the center disappears, and normal people acting not irrationally end up acting like extremists." In other words, if you're a resident of Baghdad, the most rational response is to seek protection from one of the militias-al-Qaeda if you're Sunni, the Mahdi Army if you're Shi'ite-or to get out of town. "It's impossible to get your teeth fixed in Baghdad," a U.S. intelligence official told me recently. "All the dentists have left the country...
...Baghdad alone is home to at least 36,000 displaced people. And there is increasing evidence that radical militias, chiefly Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, are orchestrating violent purges aimed at transforming mixed neighborhoods like Washash into ethnic strongholds. U.S. soldiers who raided a suspected Mahdi Army safe house in Washash last month say they found pages from a neighborhood housing log; among the papers was a list of 65 houses where Shi'ite families have replaced Sunni families. On other pages were drafts of threat letters clearly intended for delivery to Sunni homes. The log included a roster...
...Sunni households, whom Shi'ite death squads typically target in order to frighten a family into abandoning a home. U.S. soldiers who continue to operate in Washash don't believe the ongoing sectarian violence flows just from frictions on the streets there anymore. Instead, they put blame squarely on Mahdi Army operatives from outside the neighborhood, militants who U.S. soldiers say are out to turn Washash into a Shi'ite bastion for al-Sadr on the west side of the Tigris. "Ninety percent of the problem comes from outside in," says 2nd Lieut. Graham Ward, an Army platoon leader...
...negotiating in Jordan with Baathist representatives of the Sunni insurgency; we're trying to split them off from the al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia terrorists, and we may succeed if a re-Baathification program is put in place. It is less well known that Sadr's Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army, also has a strong Baathist component. U.S. military intelligence estimates that upwards of 30% of Sadr's militia leaders are former members of Saddam's armed forces. There is communication, and occasionally collaboration, between these Sunni and Shi'ite Baathists. In the spring of 2004, elements of the Sadr...
...Iraq's Sunni provinces have become chaotic no-go zones, with Islamic insurgents controlling Anbar province while Baathists and Islamic radicals operate barely below the surface in Salahaddin and Nineveh. And Baghdad, the heart of Iraq, is now partitioned between the Shi'ite east and the Sunni west. The Mahdi Army, the most radical of the Shi'ite militias, controls almost all the Shi'ite neighborhoods, and al-Qaeda has a large role in Sunni areas. Once a melting pot, Baghdad has become the front line of Iraq's Sunni-Shi'ite war, which is claiming at least 100 lives...