Word: militiaization
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...troops and more than 200 Iraqis have been killed in the past four days, and the fighting is showing no signs of abating. And the fact that the Sunni militants who have waged a year-long insurgency are now joined, in Baghdad and across the Shiite south, by militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has cast doubt over prospects for the U.S. achieving its political objectives in Iraq in the near future. As Republican senator Chuck Hagel put it last weekend, the U.S. may be "dangerously close" to losing control in Iraq...
...even more acute as U.S. commanders ponder a response to Friday's Shiite festival of Araba'in, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of Shiites to the holy cities of 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...
...goals. Some on the Iraqi Governing Council have denounced Moqtada and his calls for violence. Others have focused their ire at Coalition responses. But the U.S. long ago recognized that the IGC has limited support among Iraqis. Far more important than the Coalition military effort eliminate the Mahdi militia will be the stance adopted by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Even if Moqtada himself may not accept Sistani's appeals for restraint, the supreme spiritual leader is nonetheless far more influential than the young upstart. Sistani has called for calm on all sides but has criticized the Coalition's handling of Moqtada...
...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 to have...
...Army's spokesman, Major General Shaukat Sultan, acknowledged that no one had definitively spotted al-Zawahiri in the area since fighting flared on Tuesday. Lieut. General Safdar Hussain, the Frontier Corps commander, told journalists that a vehicle that may have been carrying al-Zawahiri managed to crash through militia roadblocks and escape. Yet what made the military believe they might still have a trophy in their gunsights was that al-Qaeda fighters normally vanish when confronted with a sizable force. This time they resisted fiercely, as if to protect someone special. Somewhere between 200 and 400 militants kept...