Word: militiaization
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Capt. Erik Peterson knows fighters from the Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr are all around, even though he can't see them. Peterson and his men usually catch only glimpses of the Mahdi Army while on the streets of Ghazaliya, a sprawling neighborhood in western Baghdad where Shi'ite militants are pressing a campaign to drive out Sunnis. Acting on neighborhood tips, Peterson's men search suspected Mahdi Army safe houses, which often have a green ribbon hanging on the front door. Sometimes the signs are even more obvious. One house thought to be a Mahdi Army fighting...
...efforts to either detach Maliki from his key patron - Sadr, whose militia is in the thick of much of the sectarian violence - or else persuade Shi'ite rivals such as Abdulaziz al-Hakim to form a new coalition with the Sunnis and Kurds, excluding Maliki and Sadr, appear to be floundering. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the supreme Shi'ite spiritual leader whose expressed will neither Maliki nor Hakim can cross, has made clear that he will not tolerate any moves that break the unity of the ruling Shi'ite coalition that includes Maliki, Hakim and Sadr...
...earlier incarnation, Aidid was - and some say still is - commander of a clan militia that ruled a district of Mogadishu from the barrel of a gun. A naturalized U.S. citizen and a Marine who served in the first Gulf War, Aidid was a successor to his father, Mohammed Farah Aidid, the warlord who battled American troops in the Somalian capital in 1993, killing 18, in a bloody street battle made famous by the movie Black Hawk Down. (Mohammed Farah Aidid was killed in 1996.) Today, by virtue of the Byzantine clan structure and shifting power deals that carve up this...
...keep defending ourselves for two or three months like this," says Hamed, who plans to begin forming a militia in mid-January unless the picture changes. "But we've already decided to attack them if they keep attacking...
...Cartee and other U.S. officers don't blame Hamed for thinking of forming a militia, even though the prospect presents huge problems for them. Any fighters who come to Hamed's aid are likely to include Sunni militants with some degree of affinity for al-Qaeda in Iraq or the insurgency. Hamed acknowledges as much, and he tells Cartee again and again that he'd hate to end up on the wrong side of the Americans. But time is running out, and few other options remain as long as U.S. forces are unable to quell the sectarian violence overwhelming...