Word: mahdy
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...ites and Sunnis fighting? Why now? There are several explanations for the timing of the outbreak of hostilities, each tied to a particular interpretation of how events unfolded after the fall of Saddam Hussein: flawed American postwar policies, provocation by foreign jihadis, retaliation by militias like al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the ineptitude of Iraqi politicians and, lately, Iranian interference. But the rage burning in people like Muslawi and Hussein has much deeper and older roots. It is the product of centuries of social, political and economic inequality, imposed by repression and prejudice and frequently reinforced by bloodshed. The hatred...
...Ghazaliyah, northeast of Baghdad's airport, Iraq's savage and complex civil war has been playing out in miniature. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia has been encroaching from Shula, the Shi'a-dominated neighborhood to the north. The Sunni minority has virtually vanished from northern Gazaliyah, driven away by murder and intimidation. In the heavily Sunni southern part of the neighborhood homegrown insurgents and foreign jihadists have been attacking the Americans and Shi'a-dominated security forces...
...Part of the explanation, said Capt. Erik Peterson, may be the Mahdi Army's plan to lie low and deny the Americans targets for their operations. But the 29-year-old company commander said that didn't explain a similar decline in activity by Sunni insurgents. He said Charlie Company had recently conducted raids against Mahdi Army targets and clearing operations against Sunni insurgents. Several members of the company said they had just completed an operation in which they captured Sunni insurgents, including several sniper teams. Still, it is unlikely that those operations alone could have blunted the Mahdi army...
...Meanwhile the militia and the insurgents have been finding ways to operate under the radar and out of firing range. On the streets of Ghazaliyah, Sgt. Michaud said, the Mahdi Army continued to "slowly, but surely," force Sunnis from their homes through other forms of intimidation. The more immediate threat, though, may be a spectacular Sunni insurgent attack designed to show residents in Ghazaliyah that their power has not been blunted. "If I'm the enemy, I've lost the initiative," Peterson said. "I've got to do something big and visual...
...course, the show must go on. "The tragedy fills you with all this suffering and you still have to go on stage," said Mahdi, as he excused himself to go to his dressing room and change into the black dish-dash and headscarf that is his bodyguard costume. "The audience doesn't care about your pain. They have their...