Word: moqtada
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strong was Iraqi opposition to the U.S. offensive at Fallujah that up to half of the Iraqi troops sent there disobeyed deployment orders, and at least one politician resigned from the Governing Council. Later, a broad cross-section of Iraqi politicians warned that the U.S. military campaign against Moqtada Sadr and his supporters was creating more of a problem than Sadr himself represented...
...Sadrists. The rebel cleric clearly believes he can make the U.S. strategy work to his advantage because military actions in Karbala and Najaf deepens the hostility of ordinary Shiites towards the Coalition, potentially undermining the standing of Sistani and those Shiites working in the Governing Council, while burnishing Moqtada's own appeal. Sadr is clearly using his fight with the Americans as his campaign platform to eclipse rivals in the battle for Shiite support. Sistani and his aides know that Sadr may be strongest precisely when the U.S. is sending tanks into Najaf after him, and have long counseled that...
...join its police forces or its Governing Council. The indigenous insurgent challenge has grown and multiplied: U.S. troops now fight on two fronts, facing both Sunni insurgents whose number include both former Baathist officers, nationalists and Islamists, as well as Shiite fighters loyal to the militant rabble rouser Moqtada Sadr - and, of course, a foreign terrorist element whose frequent high-profile suicide attacks, such as Monday's killing of the head of the Governing Council, Izzedine Saleem, sow chaos and keep the occupation authority on the defensive. The prevailing paradox is that while the Coalition's forces...
...month-long standoff with Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi militia, however, has thus far defied all efforts at a mediated solution. Fierce clashes provoked by Sadrist fire this week drew the Americans ever closer to fighting outside the sacred shrines in Najaf and Karbala. Sadr appears to be riding on the U.S. campaign against him as a means to eclipse his rivals in the battle for Shiite support. His tactics appear to involve goading the U.S. into increasingly risky actions around the holy sites, and then publicly lambasting Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for failing to act on his warning...
...three-way game, using his confrontation with the Americans to challenge his political rivals in the Shiite community. Even as negotiations continue, his forces are clashing with U.S. troops at Karbala, Kufa and Baghdad. The U.S. objective may be to weaken the Mehdi militia and raise the pressure on Moqtada, but the firebrand cleric appears to be using that pressure to his own ends - particularly to challenge his more moderate rivals, chief among them Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sadr has long rejected what he sees as Sistani's quiescence toward the occupation, and he cleverly judged that Sistani's silence...