Word: sadr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tutelage, with the UN confined to the role of humanitarian NGO and occasional consultant. But the realities on the ground forced repeated revisions to that plan. It became clear to the U.S. military that the violent insurgencies in the Sunni triangle and among the followers of Shiite firebrand Moqtada Sadr were too deeply rooted in their communities to be eradicated by military means. And the unyielding demand for elections by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, who insisted that neither Bremer's occupation authority or any Iraqi government it appointed could legitimately decide...
...combat operations and force Iraqi troops to take over the job of maintaining security. As it did in Fallujah in April, the U.S. last week chose to deal instead of fight, this time accepting a truce with the Shi'ite militia loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, 30. The U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division agreed to pull back from the holy city of Najaf in a deal pushed by Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the most respected Shi'ite leader in the country...
...itself has taken a stunning blow. We are still recovering from the last week of April, when the Abu Ghraib photos were revealed and the U.S. military chose not to fight the Islamic radicals in Fallujah (a retreat compounded by last week's decision not to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army). Taken together, those events represent a coherent pattern of behavior--that of a schoolyard bully, who tortures the weak and runs away from the strong. This is, sadly, the way Abu Ghraib and Fallujah are perceived by our enemies. I was traveling through the Middle East...
...SADR: ON THE GROUND WITH THE INSURGENT LEADER...
Outside, toward evening, the fighting has stopped, and the gunmen gather to swap war stories. One slightly injured fighter stands in the back alley that leads to al-Sadr's Najaf headquarters. "A mortar round burst right by us, but no one was seriously injured, thanks be to God," he says. As he speaks, a crowd carrying a coffin draped in an Iraqi flag marches past the shrine. The first "martyr" of the day is being buried...