Word: militiamen
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...eight days, the warnings of a decisive military showdown echoed across Najaf as fighting raged between U.S. forces and Shi'ite militiamen for control of the holy city. The Shi'ites' truculent leader, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, vowed not to leave his bunker in the sect's sacred Imam Ali shrine "until the last drop of my blood has been spilled." The U.S. Marine colonel commanding American and Iraqi-government troops battling the stubborn gunmen of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army proclaimed his men were ready "to finish this fight that the Muqtada militia started." Iyad Allawi, the Prime Minister...
...holiest sites. The Najaf standoff has seen the U.S. and Allawi widely condemned among both Shiite and Sunni Muslim Iraqis, and thousands of Shiites have flocked to Najaf to act as "human shields" to protect Sadr in the event of a new offensive. Elsewhere in Iraq, Sadr's militiamen continue daily to demonstrate their capacity for disruption, attacking oil wells and pipelines around Basra, blowing up an American tank in the streets of east Baghdad and mounting attacks on coalition forces in major cities in between. Even the national conference came under mortar fire last Saturday, although that could...
...logic of the confrontation, however, demanded a clear victory. But the risks of a direct assault on militiamen holed up in the mosque quickly became apparent as the showdown at Najaf provoked something close to a national crisis. Even though the operation had been ordered by Allawi's government, its deputy president Ibrahim Jaafari called for a halt to the offensive, and there were scores of resignations of lower-level regional government officials in protest of the clashes in Najaf. The government rushed to assure Iraqis that American forces would not enter the Imam Ali Mosque, and any fighting there...
...Even in the face of Sadr's provocations, going on the offensive in Najaf was always a fateful gamble for Allawi. While the estimated 1,000 lightly armed Mehdi militiamen were no match for more than 3,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed number of Iraqi personnel deployed there, the political circumstances in which the battle was waged forced the Marines to fight with one hand tied behind their backs: Sadr's men were holed up in and around the Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest shrine in the Shiite Muslim tradition, and any damage to the mosque could provoke...
...seventh day of fighting between Marines and members of Sadr's Mehdi Army in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, in which hundreds of militiamen have reportedly been killed, Marines supported by helicopters and tanks entered the city to throw a steel cordon around the militants holed up in and around the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiism's holiest shrine. Sensitive to the danger that any damage to the shrine could provoke a nationwide Shiite uprising, the new Iraqi government insists that U.S. soldiers won't actually enter the shrine. But the intensity of the fighting clearly carries a huge political...