Word: militiaization
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...named. "People are really, really, really trying to persuade him." That's because the mass killing that has left some 200,000 civilians dead and more than 2 million displaced is occurring the context of a civil war that pits the government and its allied janjaweed militia against an assortment of anti-government rebel groups - including the one headed by Nur. Ending the violence in Darfur requires a peace agreement between the combatants...
Vansandt and his men are risking a nighttime foot patrol through Musayyib to gauge local support of a recent program enlisting volunteers from the town and surrounding villages into ad hoc militias supported and paid by the U.S. military. When he asks the Iraqi men how security is in town, they all smile and nod and chat among themselves excitedly. "Good. Good. Already we to go to the peace," says Salih Ibrahim, 50, an art teacher who speaks rough English and who tries to translate questions from his friends. Ibrahim says one region to the east of town still swarms...
...volunteer militias sprang up here in Babil province over the last two months under local leadership after the tribes saw successes scored by Sunni tribesmen in adjacent Anbar Province. Those homegrown groups in Anbar turned on al-Qaeda and teamed up with American forces to clear their regions of extremists, or at least put them on the run, reaping a windfall of American aid money in the process. What has surprised military officials about the groups around Musayyib, though, is that they are Shi'ite or of mixed sect, containing both Sunnis and Shi'ite residents who rejected the excesses...
Since 2004, American soldiers have treaded lightly in southern Iraq, even though all the territory north of Basra has been ostensibly the responsibility of U.S. forces. An uneasy truce prevailed in the area between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army, the militia headed by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both sides seemed eager to avoid a repeat of the open clashes that erupted in 2004 in Karbala and Najaf, where Sadr's militia holds sway. So U.S. troops generally stayed away...
Outwardly, the main cities in the south are in the hands of Iraqi authorities answering to the central government in Baghdad. In reality, Karbala, Najaf, Basra and the provinces they sit in are now a struggling ground between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, a rival Shi'ite militia also though to have links to Iran. American forces remained on the sidelines as the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade waged bloody campaigns against one another across southern Iraq this summer. On August 28, gunmen from the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade battled in the streets of Karbala...