Word: militiaization
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...army base nearby. Sutton was one of the few Army officers who personally knew the informant, believed to be about 19 years old, with family in the neighborhood. For roughly four weeks, Sutton and other Army officers had worked with him to gather intelligence on the local activities of militia loyal to Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr...
...heads of important families that had lived there a long time and could be tapped for local knowledge and advice. Their first piece of advice: Stay away from the local police. The police in the neighborhood were known to be members of the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia often blamed for the kidnapping and murder of Sunnis in Baghdad. "One of the sheiks--and he was a Shi'ite--said the police may themselves have been involved in taking Waddah," Haseeba says. "And even if they weren't, they would not help a Sunni family. They would only harass...
...TIME.com: Maliki has no militia of his own, unlike two of the key components of his coalition - the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the movement of Moqtada Sadr. How plausible is it to expect that SCIRI and the Sadr movement will give up their militias...
...Juan Cole: It's not plausible for them to give up their militias entirely. They have, of course, been willing to see those militias incorporated into state institutions - SCIRI's Badr Brigade has been incorporated into the Interior Ministry forces [in whose uniforms they are accused of sectarian killings], while the Mahdi Army has been drawn into the police force in some parts of the country - but they tend to be incorporated in ways that retain their militia identity. The calculation of the U.S. and Maliki last summer was correct: The militias exist because Shi'ites feel insecure. And that...
...also worth remembering that Shi'ite politicians commanding militias are not following a Western political model in which participating in government at the same time as maintaining a private militia is unthinkable. The only country in the region with which they're familiar that has elections, a parliament, a president and so on, is Iran. And many of the institutions in Iran, since the revolution, have a dual character. So Hakim and Sadr think of their militias as analogous to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which exist as a paramilitary institution separate from and not entirely integrated with the regular military...