Word: moqtada
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Where in the world is Moqtada al-Sadr? He hasn't been seen in public in several weeks, and he has not kept up his usual practice of leading Friday prayers at the Great Mosque in Kufa. Now U.S. officials are claiming the firebrand anti-American cleric fled to Iran two or three weeks ago, along with several commanders of his dreaded Mahdi Army militia. But senior Sadr officials in Baghdad have dismissed those claims as propaganda, and maintain he is still in his Najaf headquarters...
...Some clerics in Najaf told TIME that Sadr has left quietly, and that his office there is still keeping up the pretense that he is in town. ?When you ask for a meeting with Moqtada, they say, 'He's busy,'? said one cleric, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from Sadr's supporters. ?After they did that a few times, it became clear that he was no longer in Najaf...
...majority of EFP attacks, the officials said, came from "rogue" elements of Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army. The officials would not go further than that to associate the leader of the powerful Shi'a militia to Iran. This is the same line the U.S. walks when attributing militia violence and death squad murders to the Mahdi Army. Sadr is the highest-profile - and likely the most effective single opponent - of the American presence in Iraq. But he is also a power broker in Iraq's government and a key supporter of the Iraqi prime minister. It is therefore politically tricky...
...said Abu Firas al-Saedi, a senior Dawa leader. "But the real question is: 'Why are the Arab states allowing terrorists to enter Iraq through their borders, and why are they financing them?'" That sentiment was echoed by parliamentarian Falah Shansal, from the Shi'a bloc of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. "There are groups in Saudi Arabia who finance terrorism in Iraq," he said. "Why are the Americans not talking about this...