Word: mahdi
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...journey to the shrine of Imam Ali was a harrowing trip that would take me and photographer Thorne Anderson through the American cordon around Najaf, crossing a stretch of burned out no-man's land and then navigating the al Mahdi Army lines. It took roughly two and a half hours to go from the southeastern edge of the city, which forced us to cross open ground where snipers fired down on us from their perches in shattered buildings...
...then on the ninth day, everyone drew back. A delegation of Iraqi leaders led by Allawi's National Security Adviser, Muwaffak al-Rubaie, arrived from Baghdad to open talks with al-Sadr aides. U.S. troops suspended their offensive against the Mahdi Army, while the fighters who had battled the Americans hand to hand melted back into the sanctuary of the shrine...
...always set the al-Sadr line apart from the Iranian-born Shi'ite ayatullahs like Sistani. For radicals who want to see religious power in the hands of an ethnic Arab, al-Sadr has the right pedigree. Soon he was recruiting Shi'ites into an armed militia, the Mahdi Army, named for the messiah the Shi'ites await. Their stated aim was to drive foreign infidels from the holy cities. But al-Sadr also wanted to deter aggressive Sunni militants from leaving Shi'ites out in the cold and to counter the militias belonging to other Shi'ite pretenders...
...Mahdi militia regarded the new forces as a rival gang on its turf. Two weeks ago, government security men arrested one of al-Sadr's closest aides in nearby Karbala, and the truce unraveled from there. Al-Sadr's militiamen then accused U.S. Marines, who have recently taken over responsibility for policing Najaf, of breaking the cease-fire's rules by moving into parts of the city that were supposed to be off limits to them. U.S. officials put the blame on the militia: in the early hours of Aug. 5, Mahdi fighters assaulted a police station with such ferocity...
Well, I don't know. We really don't know. We have arrested a lot of people in Najaf, and when we ask them who they're with, they say they are not with al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The crimes that have been committed have been quite obvious. You visit Basra now and see the destruction of the oil pipeline. Or if you go and ask the [families of the] people who were killed, the innocent bystanders, and you go and meet the families of the policemen who were killed in Najaf ... These are really acts of criminals...