Word: najaf
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...with sectarian violence waning for the time being, the stage may be set for an escalation of the simmering battle among Shi'ites for control of southern Iraq. In Najaf, the spiritual center of Shi'ite Iraq, public displays of respect and cooperation mask an often violent competition between rival factions. Since shortly after the American invasion The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) - known until May 2007 as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI - has clashed, often violently, with followers of the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. This summer Sadr announced a "freeze...
...this fall the violence has not boiled over again into pitched battles, as it has several times in the past across southern Iraq. But residents in Najaf say militias loyal to SIIC and the Sadrists are engaged in more targeted violence. Aysser Ali, 35, said kidnappings and assassinations are the tactics of choice for now. "I would believe that nobody goes out of his house without thinking that somebody will come and shoot him in the head," Ali says. Still, he says he is hopeful that the public's growing weariness of militia violence will eventually calm the situation...
...another Najaf resident, Hassan Kammona, says that neither the Sadrists nor SIIC were doing enough to rein in their foot soldiers. "If the people in charge of security are serious - not just for Najaf but for all of Iraq - they have to educate their followers [about] how to respect the law," he says...
...tribal leaders from Anbar and Karbala provinces," which are the Sunni and Shi'ite heartlands, respectively. "The governors of those provinces were literally building trenches on their border, and they are now meeting regularly. You had the highest-ranking Sunni politician in the country, Tariq al-Hashemi, go to Najaf to meet with the leading Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani. All of this would have been unthinkable only a few months...
Outwardly, the main cities in the south are in the hands of Iraqi authorities answering to the central government in Baghdad. In reality, Karbala, Najaf, Basra and the provinces they sit in are now a struggling ground between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, a rival Shi'ite militia also though to have links to Iran. American forces remained on the sidelines as the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade waged bloody campaigns against one another across southern Iraq this summer. On August 28, gunmen from the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade battled in the streets of Karbala...