Word: sadr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sadrists, for their part, demonstrated their capacity to disrupt the peace throughout southern Iraq, and in the capital where they essentially run the vast Shiite slum known as Sadr City, which houses two million people. Mehdi militants confronted Coalition forces in a number of southern Iraqi cities, and at Basra they even managed to take Iraq's oil exports offline. Beside the firefights initiated by his militias, there were also tens of thousands of Iraqis on the streets demonstrating against the U.S.-Allawi offensive by week's end. Particularly worrying to the new government will have been the spectacle...
...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...
...anything, Sadr's decision to confront Allawi and the Americans from inside the holy city reflects a canny, and often underestimated political instinct on the part of the populist cleric. Ever since Baghdad fell to U.S. forces in April 2003, Sadr has parlayed his strong following among the Shiite urban poor and the growing resentment toward the U.S. to his own advantage. And his previous showdown 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...
...Allawi appears to have recognized Sadr's influence, because he has strenuously attempted to woo the cleric to join the political process under the interim government. He reiterated his offer on Thursday. "This government calls upon all the armed groups to drop their weapons and rejoin society," Allawi said in a statement. "The political process is 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...
...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...