Word: regionality
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...political district of Mahmudiyah lies just south of metropolitan Baghdad and includes the violent urban centers of Yusifiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. It shares a rough-and-tumble neighborhood with Anbar to the west and Babil to the south. A mixed region of Shi'a and Sunni, city and country, the mostly agricultural region suffers all the sectarian, economic and political woes of the capital. While the region's Sunni and Shi'ite tribes battled each other for land and primacy, they found a common enemy in the U.S. troops stationed there. But that situation changed about four months...
Tribal leaders approached the soldiers, who in turn notified civilian leaders, including the local Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, a State Department-sponsored unit of development and security experts working in the region since early this year. The EPRT turned to the U.S. Institute for Peace, a body created by Congress in the 1990s, to assemble the tribes, local Iraqi Army and local political leaders into working groups to come up with a plan. A delegation even traveled to Amman, Jordan, to convince exiled former members of the ousted Ba'ath regime...
...military leaders said they know they walk a tightrope, and that the reconciliation process, if that's what this really is, is delicate at best. "I don't have a crystal ball," said Kershaw, who has less than a month left in Iraq before his unit turns the region over to the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. "But five months ago people told me this wouldn't last a month. And look," he said, pointing to the unlikely gathering of sheiks at the al Rashid Thursday. "All I know is that the more this has taken root...
...recent fighting can be directly linked to any outside group, local security officials say that they can now add to the list of troublemakers elements of al-Qaeda and other Sunni Arab fighters, who appear to be taking advantage of the chaos to regain a toehold in the region and accelerate the flow of Shi'a blood...
...members of the rival Jaish al Mahdi, the militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr. (The SIIC was formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, with the initials SCIRI.) While both groups are engaged in a raw and bloody fight for dominance in the region, they are also pitted against each other by basic political positions that are key to the Shi'ite majority in search of a national identity and place in Iraq's future...