Word: muqtada
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Here's one catch: there is a missing player in all this hugging and goat eating. He is Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia and, quite possibly, the most popular Shi'ite political figure in the country. Al-Sadr is less accessible, a fuzzier figure than al-Hakim. The U.S. intelligence community has only a vague sense of how much control he has over his disparate movement, which includes everything from Iranian-trained guerrillas, referred to as "special groups," to ragtag teenage criminal street gangs who claim the Mahdi mantle. He has been spending...
...where the congressional questioning should focus. Will Petraeus propose moving U.S. troops into the restive Shi'ite south? What will he do about Basra, the crucial southern oil port where the British retreat has left slow-motion anarchy, a Shi'ite gang war? What will he do about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the most powerful and popular force in Shi'ite Iraq? The general's own staff is divided on many of these questions. But David Kilcullen, Petraeus' leading counterinsurgency specialist, recently wrote a piece in Small Wars Journal that may reflect the general's current thinking...
Freeman felt certain that the Iraqis he and his soldiers were supposed to be helping did not want them there. He and other troops suspected some of the police were members of the Mahdi Army, the militia of radical anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. That's not unusual, given that the largely Shi'ite personnel of Iraq's Ministry of Interior have long been seen as a de facto wing of the Mahdi Army. National police are suspected of taking part in the militia's sectarian killings in Baghdad. And in southern Iraq, where al-Sadr...
...many as 500 Hizballah operatives are at work training militiamen at the behest of Iran. The PMOI, which claims to have an extensive intelligence network, says most of the Hizballah operatives are serving as trainers or assistant trainers to the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr...
None of these machinations have much to do with the situation on the ground in Iraq. The political situation there has grown dire. There is a wicked little battle brewing between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his most powerful Shi'ite supporter, Muqtada al-Sadr. "In just a few months, al-Maliki has moved from 'You can't go after al-Sadr' to seeing [al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia] as a serious threat to his power," Ambassador Crocker told me in Baghdad a few weeks ago. Both al-Maliki and al-Sadr are plotting and scheming to oust...