Word: militiaization
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...weeks ago in Ramadi, he did something quite remarkable. He went to meet and make peace with the more than 100 Sunni sheiks who led the movement to kick al-Qaeda in Iraq out of Anbar province. He was accompanied by the leader of his family's militia, the Badr Organization, which was lethally anti-Sunni until recently. The Hakim delegation was ferried to the meeting in Black Hawk helicopters by the U.S. military. "It was quite a scene," a U.S. military officer who was present told me. "Amar went through a receiving line, hugging each of the Sunni sheiks...
Here's one catch: there is a missing player in all this hugging and goat eating. He is Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia and, quite possibly, the most popular Shi'ite political figure in the country. Al-Sadr is less accessible, a fuzzier figure than al-Hakim. The U.S. intelligence community has only a vague sense of how much control he has over his disparate movement, which includes everything from Iranian-trained guerrillas, referred to as "special groups," to ragtag teenage criminal street gangs who claim the Mahdi mantle. He has been spending...
...cities in Anbar Province, have calmed down. The local government and security forces of Diwaniyah are largely controlled by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and its armed wing, the Badr Corps, who are challenged almost daily in the streets by members of the rival Jaish al Mahdi, the militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr. (The SIIC was formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with the initials SCIRI.) While both groups are engaged in a raw and bloody fight for dominance in the region, they are also pitted against each other by basic political...
...general, the SIIC and Badr militia, who have shown more willingness to work with both the Coalition and Iran in their bid for power, advocate a soft partitioning of Iraq and the creation of a semi-autonomous political region in the South that they, of course, would control. The Sadrists, for their part, wrap themselves in a nationalist banner and advocate a strong central government in Baghdad, where the Sadrists have the majority of their most fervent constituency and the ear of the Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, and where they run several key government ministries...
...worded communique effectively accusing an investigating judge of the supreme court of plotting to implicate the President in a failed murder attempt. Uribe said he had received a letter from a mid-level paramilitary leader known as "Tasmania" saying magistrate Ivan Velazquez had offered legal benefits to the jailed militia leader if he testified that the President had ordered a failed 2003 hit on another paramilitary member known as Rene...