Word: mahdy
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...military won't simply try to crush the Mahdi Army. Instead, it will put more Americans on Baghdad's streets, working more closely with Iraqi units, and focus on protecting civilians and limiting the ability of insurgents and militiamen to move among them. It's the most difficult kind of warfare, Taylor says - one his men had one year to prepare for between deployments in Iraq. Each U.S. soldier is not simply tasked with hunting down the enemy at all costs. "He's an armed individual, " Taylor says, "who has to practice restraint in order to be successful...
...with 17,500 of them deployed to Baghdad, the bleeding heart of the country's civil war. In his Jan. 10 speech announcing the surge, President Bush said U.S. troops would have "a green light" to go into the lairs of powerful Shi'ite militias like al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which until now have been left largely untouched by them. That hands-off policy has turned Sadr City into Baghdad's ground zero: a bristling hothouse of sectarian hatred that exists outside the control of U.S. and Iraqi authorities. The success or failure of the surge may hinge...
...glance down any street reveals the place for what it is, one of the world's biggest and poorest slums. Clouds of flies roll over roads and alleyways covered in the stench of rotting garbage and open sewers. Houses are so close together in some areas that Mahdi Army fighters say they can jump from roof to roof for miles, keeping watch on streets below...
...Sadr seldom appears in Sadr City. He normally resides in the southern Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, where U.S. forces battled the Mahdi Army in 2004. U.S. troops stage occasional raids in the sector against Mahdi Army operatives, which the Pentagon now considers a greater threat to security than al-Qaeda. But al-Maliki has consistently stopped American forces from waging an all-out assault on the Mahdi Army or its leadership out of fear of alienating his political base. "The Iraqi leadership has prevented us from targeting some leaders," says a senior military official. "Our understanding is that...
Still, Administration officials won't say whether they intend to take on the Mahdi Army immediately. Retired four-star Army General Jack Keane, who has been advising the White House, says the U.S. plans to focus first on stabilizing mixed Sunni-Shi'ite neighborhoods, which, in theory, would bolster confidence in both communities and give al-Maliki the political space to take on al-Sadr's militias on his own. "After a number of weeks, Maliki will get the leverage ... to persuade the Shi'a militia leaders to get off the offensive," Keane says...