Word: najaf
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...logic of the confrontation, however, demanded a clear victory. But the risks of a direct assault on militiamen holed up in the mosque quickly became apparent as the showdown at Najaf provoked something close to a national crisis. Even though the operation had been ordered by Allawi's government, its deputy president Ibrahim Jaafari called for a halt to the offensive, and there were scores of resignations of lower-level regional government officials in protest of the clashes in Najaf. The government rushed to assure Iraqis that American forces would not enter the Imam Ali Mosque, and any fighting there...
...Even in the face of Sadr's provocations, going on the offensive in Najaf was always a fateful gamble for Allawi. While the estimated 1,000 lightly armed Mehdi militiamen were no match for more than 3,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed number of Iraqi personnel deployed there, the political circumstances in which the battle was waged forced the Marines to fight with one hand tied behind their backs: Sadr's men were holed up in and around the Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest shrine in the Shiite Muslim tradition, and any damage to the mosque could provoke...
...with the U.S. - last April, when they tried to arrest him in connection with a warrant issued by an Iraqi judge - had showed that tangling with the Americans actually boosted, rather than undermined his political standing in Iraq. The problem facing Allawi and the U.S. in waging war in Najaf has been that while Sadr may be unpopular among many of the townsfolk and viewed somewhat ambiguously by a wider Shiite audience, the U.S. is considerably more unpopular, a trend that the fact of handing authority to the new government last June does not yet appear to have reversed...
...open to all, and everyone is invited to take part in it." But Sadr has rejected the terms, refusing to be recognized simply as one among hundreds of leaders, many of whom have no proven constituency. And his refusal to withdraw his forces from around the holy sites in Najaf, instead stockpiling weapons there, eventually prompted the government to act. Even if Sadr himself was to be brought into the political process, they reasoned, he could not be allowed to maintain an independent military capability. Destroying the Mehdi army would show Allawi's resolve to brook no insurgent challenges...
...rush to squelch reports that Sadr had been wounded offered a reminder of the prospect that were he to be killed in battle, there may be no way of ending his insurgency. Even if the Sadrists could be ejected from Najaf by military force - they are, after all, mostly an expeditionary force whose members are drawn from outside the city, and are not exactly well-loved within its native population or its clerical establishment - the result might be a long-term insurgency throughout the Shiite south and in the capital. Given the fact that Sunni insurgents are currently in effective...