Word: militiaization
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...series of bloody attacks on Shi'ite pilgrims traveling through central Iraq has raised the question of whether the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shi'ite militia loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, should be officially allowed to bear arms as a community security force. The Mahdi Army had protected previous pilgrimages, but has also been linked to executions and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis; it recently stood down its men, under pressure from the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, to avoid clashes with U.S. and Iraqi military forces securing Baghdad...
...that 50 protesters were detained. The Other Russia, however, states that at least two hundred protesters were taken into custody and beaten, with hundreds more violently mishandled in the street. Sergei Gulyayev, a member of the city's legislature, told the media that the OMON, Russia's special purpose militia, dragged him down as he was addressing fellow protesters so brutally that his head crashed over stone pavement and he recovered only in a squad car that took him to a precinct...
...Holocaust, Stalin his purges or Mao his Great Leap Forward. Were justice and reckoning not cheated by the deaths of Milosevic and Pinochet? What about more recent atrocities? On Feb. 27, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague presented evidence that a Sudanese government minister and a militia leader were allegedly responsible for war crimes committed in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. When wounds are so fresh, it's difficult to argue for forgiveness...
...picture. Shi'ites are now politically dominant in Iraq, and Iran is the leading Shi'ite power. So in most Arab capitals, the sectarian war in Iraq is increasingly blamed on Iran. Taken along with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear ambitions, Iran's sponsorship of the Shi'ite Hizballah militia in Lebanon and its backing of Hamas, Iran's supposed meddling in Iraq is proof to Arab leaders that their old Persian rivals are determined to reshape the Middle East to suit their own interest...
...Sunni-Shi'ite violence that has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the past two decades. In the latest attacks, three separate suicide bombings killed 21 during the Ashura rituals in January. In Lebanon, sectarian tensions have risen after years of relative calm. Hizballah, the Shi'ite militia, won praise from Sunnis when Israeli forces left Lebanon in 2000. But after the assassination in February 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni, intra-Muslim antagonism began to harden. Sunnis blamed Hizballah's patron, the Syrian government, for the killing. While faulting Hizballah for provoking last summer...