Word: moqtada
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...more than $1 billion during his eight-month tenure. Then the earnest but lackluster Ibrahim al Jaafari who managed to bring Sunnis into the constitutional debate but stood by as sectarian militias infiltrated the police force. Now Nouri al-Malaki faces pressure to defang his most significant political backer, Moqtada al Sadr...
...series of bloody attacks on Shi'ite pilgrims traveling through central Iraq has raised the question of whether the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shi'ite militia loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, should be officially allowed to bear arms as a community security force. The Mahdi Army had protected previous pilgrimages, but has also been linked to executions and ethnic cleansing of Sunnis; it recently stood down its men, under pressure from the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, to avoid clashes with U.S. and Iraqi military forces securing Baghdad...
...Despite the grumbling from politicians, it is still unclear whether opposition to the law is strong enough to kill it. Among the parliamentarians arguing against the law are Moqtada al-Sadr's bloc, which fears that foreign oil companies will move into Iraq in force, and stay long after U.S. soldiers have left. But logistically they will have to race back to Baghdad to vote against it. Many parliamentarians, like al-Mutlaq, spend much of their time outside Iraq - al-Sadr himself is frequently in Iran. "I'm going back for this very reason," al-Mutlaq says. "We cannot...
...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...
...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...