Word: mahdy
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...city from militia strongholds have a difficult time carrying out attacks amid car searches and street watches by U.S. troops. Perhaps the most visible example of this came in October, when U.S. forces threw up a temporary blockade around the Shi'a slum of Sadr City, home to the Mahdi Army militia blamed for much of the sectarian killings around Baghdad. During the days when the Sadr City cordon was in place, Baghdad saw noticeably fewer murders. The episode revealed two important things. First, U.S. forces can ratchet down the killings in Baghdad, at least for a time, with basic...
...empowerment that won't be confined to that country: From Lebanon to the Persian Gulf, through peaceful elections and bloody conflicts, the Shi'ites are making their presence felt. The headlines of 2006 have been dominated by the likes of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army as sectarian warfare surged in Iraq; by Hizballah, emboldened by its summer war with Israel to challenge Lebanon's fragile political order; and by Iran's defiance of international demands over its nuclear program...
...experience of the troops assigned to Mekanik, a mixed neighborhood that is home to both the powerful Shi'ite Mahdi Army and a Sunni militant group called the Omar Brigade, illustrates the U.S.'s dilemmas. The neighborhood had suffered months of killing between Sunnis and Shi'ites before U.S. forces found a solution: to make the murders stop, keep the cops, who were overwhelmingly Shi'ite, out. Lieut. Colonel Jeffrey Peterson, the U.S. troop commander for Mekanik, says, "Whenever we would talk to locals about [the violence], they always implicated the national police as starting it. I could never prove...
...Sadr City was a cauldron from August through October ['04]. The problem was pushed to the side because everything was building toward the operation [against Sunni insurgents] in Fallujah and the fight [against the Mahdi Army] in Najaf. Sadr City was constant problem at that time, but everyone was looking at the big fight in Fallujah...
...Right now, I have to believe that's the case. There can be no solution to Iraq's problems without tackling the militias. And this has to happen soon. We had a chance to tackle the militias in '04 [after a U.S. crackdown against the Mahdi Army], but then people were so happy Moqtada al-Sadr agreed to join the political process that they never forced his militia to disarm...