Word: mahdy
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...increasingly have offered little cause for comfort - mostly, the Iraqi police simply melted away when the Sadrists arrived to take over their facilities, and in a number of cases the police were actually seen fighting alongside the militants. If the insurrection by members of Sadr's "Army of the Mahdi" succeeds in its goal of sparking a general rebellion among Iraq's Shiite majority - which some U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe it has - the U.S. will have lost the political battle for post-Saddam Iraq...
...Najaf and Karbala. That's because the city is currently under the control of Moqtada Sadr's militia, and the cleric is holed up in his office there near the tomb of Imam Ali, the holiest shrine of the Shiite sect. The U.S. has vowed to destroy the Mahdi militia and arrest Moqtada, but the expected convergence on Najaf on Friday raises the stakes in a confrontation with the cleric who has vowed not to be taken alive...
...challenge is different from the Sunni insurgency. Instead of guerrillas attacking from the shadows and melting back into the civilian population, Moqtada al-Sadr has built a grassroots infrastructure for insurrection, with support structures in local mosques dotted around the country recruiting young men for his "Army of the Mahdi" militia. Following the arrest of one of his top aides on suspicion of involvement in the murder of a pro-U.S. cleric almost a year ago (the same incident for which Moqtada is now wanted) and the closure of his newspaper last week, the 30-year-old cleric appears...
...bloodbath, no one feels safe enough to disarm. Gun-toting Shi'ite militiamen clad in black flooded the bomb-scarred neighborhoods of Karbala and Baghdad, setting up checkpoints and clearing the streets. Thousands of Shi'ites are under arms, divided into two major groups. One, the Jaish al-Mahdi, is aligned with the firebrand radical Muqtada al-Sadr and posts its secretive fighters at his Baghdad strongholds. "Every day people are coming in to volunteer," Sheik Rada al-Zubeidy, who runs one of al-Sadr's branch offices, told TIME last week. An even larger militia called the Badr Organization...
...Sadr's courts have refrained from passing death sentences, it is only because the U.S. military would prevent any execution, says Hasan Naji, head of the Jaish al-Mahdi in Baghdad. "If the court convicts somebody, they can go complain to America, and they will come and close the court," Naji says. "But when America leaves, nobody will be able to close...