Word: militiaization
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...over the past few months, there have been glimpses of progress. In the clearings between bullet-pocked buildings and along the city's broad, leafy avenues, children play soccer and a decade's worth of trash is slowly being hauled away. Extortionate militia checkpoints and roving bands of technicals--pickups mounted with heavy artillery and carrying armed thugs--have been replaced by disciplined Islamic troops. The city's ports have reopened, buses travel the roads by day, and Somali families stroll the sidewalks by night. Barring the notable exceptions of a Swedish journalist and an Italian nun who were recently...
...Suspicion over Tuesday's kidnapping immediately fell on the Shi'ite militias who have waged a massive campaign of sectarian kidnapping and murder. The kidnap bore many of the hallmarks of a militia operation, including the use of military uniforms and the targeting of Sunnis. Al-Ujaili is a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni organization, and some Shi'ites have accused him of filling his department with cosectarians. It is common for Iraqi ministries to recruit mainly from the sect of the minister concerned...
...Sunday, Hizballah, the militia and Shi'a Muslim political party, pulled out of the governing coalition along with Amal, another Shi'a political party. Hizballah and Amal, which together represent almost all of Lebanon's Shi'a, had been demanding four new cabinet positions on the grounds that their resistance against Israel during the war over the summer merits greater representation in government...
...blunt: the U.S. military campaign to stabilize Iraq has failed. We have lost control of Anbar province, the Sunni stronghold. We are losing the battle for Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr's militia has taken control in several predominantly Shi'ite provinces. The government in Baghdad is near collapse. Sadr's support is the only real power base that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has left. If the political equation isn't changed soon, it is likely that Sadr will emerge as the de jure leader of Shi'ite Iraq. This will certainly lead to a full-scale civil...
...negotiating in Jordan with Baathist representatives of the Sunni insurgency; we're trying to split them off from the al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia terrorists, and we may succeed if a re-Baathification program is put in place. It is less well known that Sadr's Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army, also has a strong Baathist component. U.S. military intelligence estimates that upwards of 30% of Sadr's militia leaders are former members of Saddam's armed forces. There is communication, and occasionally collaboration, between these Sunni and Shi'ite Baathists. In the spring of 2004, elements of the Sadr...