Word: militiaization
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...April was the bloodiest month of the Iraq war so far. Now the Bush Administration and U.S. military commanders are adding insult to injury. After fierce battles with insurgents in Fallujah, the military has agreed to turn over command to a new militia headed by former Iraqi army officers. What's the point of this? It seems that the American soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice at Fallujah died for nothing. And that is what George W. Bush calls progress? This war has never been about WMD threats or Saddam Hussein. It is about an Administration's obsession with power...
...south vie for control of the fertile plains of Nigeria's middle belt, is "right on the fault line," as one Western diplomat puts it. That fault line ruptured again in February. In the town of Yelwa - whose some 10,000 residents are mostly Muslim - a suspected Muslim militia killed 48 Christians after a months-long dispute over land and cattle. Three weeks ago, Christian militiamen took revenge. Backed by two jeeps mounted with machine guns, the guerrillas systematically destroyed buildings and shot and bludgeoned Muslims, killing somewhere between 67 (the police estimate) and 630 (the Red Cross figure...
...members blamed the Saleem killing on the Coalition's choices at Fallujah, charging that the U.S. had essentially accepted the creation of a sanctuary from which attacks could be prepared for anywhere in Iraq. In response, IGC members are calling for a greater role for their own party-political militia in providing security. That's an option the U.S. has avoided embracing for fear of entrenching warlordism. But its reliance on Kurdish militia forces in the fight for Fallujah - and now on a crypto-Baathist one to keep the peace there - suggests there may be a piecemeal move to embrace...
...month-long standoff with Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi militia, however, has thus far defied all efforts at a mediated solution. Fierce clashes provoked by Sadrist fire this week drew the Americans ever closer to fighting outside the sacred shrines in Najaf and Karbala. Sadr appears to be riding on the U.S. campaign against him as a means to eclipse his rivals in the battle for Shiite support. His tactics appear to involve goading the U.S. into increasingly risky actions around the holy sites, and then publicly lambasting Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for failing to act on his warning...
...flanks in the Shiite community in the face not only of clerical exasperation with his provocative stance but also rival political-military factions. Chief among them is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leaders sit on the IGC but whose 10,000-man Badr Brigade militia was trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. SCIRI has begun to challenge Sadr's men for control of the streets of Najaf. The mounting tension among rival Shiite elements there may have the look of a potential civil war, but it might just as easily be the opening salvoes...