Word: militiaization
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...Iraq's malice has an echo in other parts of the Middle East, exacerbating existing tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites and reanimating long-dormant ones. In Lebanon, some Hizballah supporters seeking to topple the government in Beirut chant the name of radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is blamed for thousands of Sunni deaths. In Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, sympathy for Sunnis in Iraq is spiked with the fear, notably in official circles, of a Shi'ite tide rising across the Middle East, instigated and underwritten by an ancient enemy...
...Ghazaliyah, northeast of Baghdad's airport, Iraq's savage and complex civil war has been playing out in miniature. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia has been encroaching from Shula, the Shi'a-dominated neighborhood to the north. The Sunni minority has virtually vanished from northern Gazaliyah, driven away by murder and intimidation. In the heavily Sunni southern part of the neighborhood homegrown insurgents and foreign jihadists have been attacking the Americans and Shi'a-dominated security forces...
...Peterson's question is: "Do I think they're regrouping for an attack, or are they having issues with combat power?" In either case he and his company are hoping to exploit the situation. "This is a great opportunity to drive a wedge between the militia and the general population...
...Meanwhile the militia and the insurgents have been finding ways to operate under the radar and out of firing range. On the streets of Ghazaliyah, Sgt. Michaud said, the Mahdi Army continued to "slowly, but surely," force Sunnis from their homes through other forms of intimidation. The more immediate threat, though, may be a spectacular Sunni insurgent attack designed to show residents in Ghazaliyah that their power has not been blunted. "If I'm the enemy, I've lost the initiative," Peterson said. "I've got to do something big and visual...
...drug mafias in the 1980s to fight off extortion and kidnapping by leftist guerrillas. The paramilitaries later turned into powerful armies heavily involved in drug trafficking and extortion themselves, and who used their power to control local politics, including prosecutors' offices and courts. The former chiefs of the militia groups, which demobilized as many as 30,000 troops in the past three years, are currently being prosecuted for their crimes under a controversial law that grants them reduced prison sentences of up to eight years for confessing to crimes. Few of the charges that have been filed against the lawmakers...