Word: moqtada
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leaders appeared to be unraveling, Thursday, as insurgents failed to meet the U.S. demand that they surrender their heavy weapons. But a renewed outbreak of fighting there would likely further polarize Iraqi public opinion against the Coalition. In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, meanwhile, the wanted rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr appeared to be mimicking the Fallujah insurgents' taunting of the U.S. military, breaking off negotiations in the expectation that the Coalition would pay a heavy political price for going into the city with guns blazing...
...Iraqi caretaker government. That's hardly a hypothetical problem, as the current standoffs at Fallujah and Najaf show: Iraqi Governing Council leaders, including one or two tapped for top positions in the caretaker government, objected furiously to U.S. tactics at Fallujah and against the Shiite supporters of the cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fact that the U.S. military backed off in both Najaf and Fallujah to allow Iraqi politicians space to try and resolve those standoffs through negotiations is telling. While the U.S. military is following the natural instinct of an occupying army to establish its authority and protect its forces...
...only the scale of resistance in Fallujah that has shocked U.S. officials in Iraq. The Shiite insurrection launched by the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr has proven surprisingly tenacious, and U.S. military actions against Sadr supporters in the Shiite slums of Baghdad have also provoked widespread outrage in Iraq's majority ethnic community. The two-front insurrection and the tough response by the U.S. has even had an ironic nation-building effect, as the plight of the besieged city has become an anti-American rallying point across Iraq's traditional Sunni-Shiite divide. Thousands of impoverished Shiites in Baghdad's Sadr...
...open to suggestions" on ways of reducing violence in Iraq. Iraqis on the Governing Council appear to have stepped forward with solutions of their own, negotiating cease-fires both in Fallujah and also with the Sadrists in the South. Seven members of the IGC reportedly met Moqtada Sadr in Najaf at the weekend and secured an agreement under which his forces would withdraw from police stations and government buildings they'd occupied, in exchange for undertakings to address his political demands and, according to some reports, to shelve a warrant for his arrest...
...Brigadier General Kimmitt, however, insists the U.S. has no knowledge or part of any such deals, and that its policy remains that Moqtada must either be captured or killed. But like in Fallujah, this hard line on the Sadrists adopted against the advice of its allies in the IGC may paint the U.S. into a tactical corner. It will be hard-pushed, for example, to ease the siege of Fallujah while leaving the insurgent structure there intact, or to back off its vow to "destroy" Sadr's militia. And yet in both cases sticking to those goals are alienating growing...