Word: mahdi
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...legislature into session this coming Sunday - which would have begun a 60-day countdown to decide on the next prime minister and his cabinet - was also blocked. In this case it was the Shi'ite politician most likely to replace Jaafari as the nominee, Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, who put Shi'ite unity above his own partisan interests. On Tuesday, Jaafari refused to entertain any notion of stepping aside from his candidacy, declaring that "no one can make bargains with me by enlarging personal disagreements...
...nomination of the Shi'ite alliance by only one vote, thanks to the intervention of radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, who threw his 32 votes (among the 128 seats held by the Shi'ite alliance) behind the incumbent. Jaafari's rival in that contest was none other than Abdel Mahdi, a candidate preferred by the U.S. and a top official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with which Sadr has been engaged in a long-running battle for Shi'ite political supremacy...
...been infiltrated by Shi'ite militias and death squads. "Those who killed my cousins will be punished," says Mohammed, "but not by the police or the government. They will answer to God." Many others are pinning their hopes for revenge on armed vigilantes or sectarian militias like the Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups. Although politicians and religious leaders have called on the militias to end the violence, reports from across the country indicate that many fighters are ignoring those appeals and instead responding to the growing resentments in the street...
Fear of the militias is palpable, even in neighborhoods where there have been heartening signs of Sunni-Shi'ite comity. In Shi'ite-majority al-Shulla, militias damaged the tiny al-Haq Sunni mosque with rocket-propelled grenades. Afterward, members of the local unit of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army surrounded the mosque, guarding it from further attack. "That afternoon and night the Shi'ites prayed in my mosque," says the grateful local imam, Jawhar Omar al-Zibari. "They told me they would die before allowing another attack." But the imam's Sunni flock is streaming out of the area...
...Sadr does have one potential trump card: his strident anti-Americanism has helped him broaden his support base, so that many Iraqi Sunnis regard him as the only Shi'ite leader they can trust. Sunni groups contributed men and material to support the Mahdi Army's uprisings against U.S. forces, and elements of the Mahdi Army fought alongside Sunni insurgents in the battle of Fallujah in fall 2004. "He is somebody who has fought against the occupying forces," says Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, the leading Sunni clerical body. "All other Shi'ite leaders...