Word: muqtada
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Salmon can find some of it among Basra's children. At a multifaith school run by the Chaldean church, 4-year-olds wrestle with the universal question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Several want to be doctors. Allawi plans a career in business. Muqtada wants to be a soldier. It doesn't seem unrealistic to hope that he won't be needed to keep the peace in his own city...
...Baghdad are calling for the group to be allowed to remain in Iraq, or at least to not be turned over to Iran, for political reasons. "We have to deal with this issue very delicately," says Ayad Jamal al-Deen, an Iraqi parliamentarian aligned with Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "I'm not here to defend this organization. I have no interest in them. But I am looking out for the Iraqi national interest." Al-Deen and other Iraqi political figures see the group essentially as a bargaining chip with Iran, one of the few Iraq holds against...
...election day. With the vehicle ban, suicide bombers on foot and rocket or mortar fire pose the biggest threats. But so far there has been little sign that Iraq's militants are organizing a bloody show of force. The largest Shi'ite militia, the Mahdi Army of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, is essentially dormant these days. And Sunni insurgent elements in previously volatile areas such as Anbar and Diyala provinces appear to be, by and large, staying their hand in the expectation that sympathetic Sunni politicians - who boycotted the last provincial election, in 2005 - will take a number of seats...
...once fearsome Muqtada al-Sadr has been very quiet lately in Iraq. Political analyst Amir Hassan Fayht says the reason the onetime Iraqi militant shows less and less political muscle is simple. "He gave it up," says Fayht, dean of the college of political science at Baghdad University, "just like that...
...bloc has shrunk to just over half its original size of 44 MPs. In the past three years, parliament has also seen the ruling Shi'ite bloc slowly split apart. The most significant blow came in 2007 with the angry departure of dozens of followers of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And the bloc's remaining big powers - al-Maliki's Dawa Islamic Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq - will be running on separate lists come Jan. 31, thereby splitting the Shi'ite vote...