Word: sadr
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Abbas seems friendly enough and laughs easily. As his car breezes through Iraqi army checkpoints at the entrance to Baghdad's notorious and sprawling Sadr City slum, he talks about killing Sunnis. "We caught Takfiris [members of a fundamentalist Sunni Islamist sect] who were [working] with the Americans. We didn't want to kill them, but the government was too weak to do anything at the time. So we killed them all and put them in a big grave...
...Abbas hasn't been killing any fellow Iraqis lately - or even Americans, his group's primary target. In fact, the vast militia of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been relatively well-behaved since al-Sadr called on his followers to stand down and allow Iraqi government forces to enter Sadr City peacefully in May. Some U.S. and Iraqi military commanders in Baghdad say al-Sadr's call for his men to remain peaceful in order to prevent "more bloodshed" served a tactical purpose, as he began to see a losing battle in the face of an empowered...
...Sadr City, Abbas and his comrades insist they haven't gone anywhere. "We're resting," he says with a smile. As if to ominously confirm Abbas' analysis, graffiti spotted around Baghdad in the past few months has warned, "We'll be back." But when? And if they're only resting, then does that mean the government has less control over the restless opposition hotbed than it has claimed? "The government is in full control of Sadr City," says the Interior Ministry official, who declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the press. "There are still...
...Sadrists in parliament maintain their distance when speaking about the militia in public. "Of course the government is controlling Sadr City," says Sadrist MP Nasir al-Saadi. But when asked whether that means the Mahdi Army has been wiped out, he says, "The Army of the Imam [a name used interchangeably with Mahdi Army] is not only in Sadr City; it is in all of Iraq. And if [government officials] think they are few in numbers, they are dreaming...
...asking all the questions. The majority of journalists live in the Red Zone and see much more of Iraqi life than anybody in the Iraqi government or the U.S. embassy. Iraqi journalists don't need to "embed" with U.S. troops in order to get to dangerous districts like Sadr City or Amariyah - they live in those neighborhoods, and they could tell Obama a lot more about the Iraqi condition than he could glean from any number of official briefings...