Word: sadr
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...reporters in Baghdad, Crocker cited a virtual cessation of mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone - strikes that military officials had claimed were becoming more accurate because of help the shooters were getting from Iran. Crocker also pointed to the announcement by Shi'ite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr calling for a cease-fire, which the ambassador suggested might have come at the behest of Tehran. (Iran may also have had a hand in brokering a truce between the two key Shi'ite militia groups, Sadr's Mahdi Amy and Badr Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council, which...
Here's one catch: there is a missing player in all this hugging and goat eating. He is Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia and, quite possibly, the most popular Shi'ite political figure in the country. Al-Sadr is less accessible, a fuzzier figure than al-Hakim. The U.S. intelligence community has only a vague sense of how much control he has over his disparate movement, which includes everything from Iranian-trained guerrillas, referred to as "special groups," to ragtag teenage criminal street gangs who claim the Mahdi mantle. He has been spending...
...local American commander sent his men out on night and early morning patrols to the Haswah area as usual, even amid radio reports that the main routes were laden with freshly planted EFPs and that at least 1,000 JAM reinforcements were on their way down from Baghdad's Sadr City, the massive JAM stronghold in the capital. The Americans knew whom they would apprehend in the event of a JAM attack: the lead JAM sheik in the negotiation said he would take full responsibility for any subsequent violence...
...Besides Sadr's Jaish al Mahdi and Hakim's Badr Corps, a new group has recently surfaced in the city called the Brigade of Hussein, named after the 7th Century Shi'ite martyr Imam Hussein, the central figure of Shi'a Islam. The group claimed responsibility for the recent attack on the Polish ambassador in Baghdad, a coordinated ambush that included a series of timed explosions and pre-planned gunfire that wounded the ambassador and killed one of his security guards. In Diwaniyah, locals say these armed groups may focus their attention on the local Polish base in the city...
Although the two groups recently pledged to work together in an accord signed by Sadr and SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al Hakim two weeks ago in Iran, the power grab plays out daily on the streets of southern cities such as Diwaniyah. "What's happening in this town is like a political duel over who's going to govern," said Ali al Mayali, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi Parliament. "It's a fight to control the street." Fueling that fight, Mayali said, is money and other support from neighboring countries. He would not point fingers. While U.S. officials point...