Word: muqtada
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...military and diplomatic officials have claimed that radical cleric Muqtada Al Sadr - accused by the U.S. of sectarian reprisals in Baghad and elsewhere in southern Iraq - and the country's largest Shi'ite party have started to send in small numbers of their armed loyalists. The status of Kirkuk, officially to be decided in a referendum by the end of 2007, is one of the most contentious issues facing the new Iraqi government; though claimed by the Kurds, it is controlled by Baghdad, which is reluctant to part with its vast oilfields...
...near impunity. While Allawi says 15 of 18 provinces are controlled by forces friendly to the new Iraqi government, that grip is shaky in Sunni areas. Even in the relatively subdued Shi'ite south, coalition forces and their Iraqi recruits face daily harassment from militants loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And the military believes that the al-Zarqawi-led insurgency is becoming more ruthless and resilient. "If we don't kill or capture them," says a U.S. general in Iraq, "they move on to fight somewhere else...
...army and police to stand between the two sides and bring calm to a volatile situation, but in many parts of the capital, the U.S.-backed forces wield less authority than the forces taking their orders from men like Saed Salah and his boss, the rebel anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials believe that hard-line Shi'ite militias are behind the daily abductions and executions of Sunnis and that they are doing as much to rile sectarian hatred as terrorists linked to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq...
...groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces to take on al-Sadr's militias. But since the support of al-Sadr's faction is critical to al-Jaafari's hold on power...
...ites don't have a majority in the parliament, and in recent days, fissures have appeared in the Shi'ite alliance. But Jaafari is backed by the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, an unpredictable political maverick with an armed militia, known as the Mahdi Army, that is widely blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence...