Word: sadrist
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...moved from 'You can't go after al-Sadr' to seeing [al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia] as a serious threat to his power," Ambassador Crocker told me in Baghdad a few weeks ago. Both al-Maliki and al-Sadr are plotting and scheming to oust each other. The Sadrist parliamentary bloc is planning to force a no-confidence vote on al-Maliki that could conceivably bring down the government. Given the amount of time it takes for the Iraqis to organize a ruling coalition--5 1/2 months last time--President Bush may find himself alone in Iraq, without...
...Maliki plans to navigate the mutually-exclusive demands of the Sadrist political bloc that keeps him in power and the U.S. whose military keeps him alive remains to be seen. But the odds are stacked against the Iraqi Prime Minister following the script outlined in the Hadley memo, and there are already indications that he isn't about to cave into Washington's demands. Indeed, it was reported Wednesday that Maliki would make his own demands of President Bush at the meeting, most notably pressing for the U.S. to transfer command of the Iraqi security forces into the hands...
...have been under way since the battle of Fallujah in 2004, with both exchanging expertise and manpower. "We have nothing against Shi'ites ... our dead are buried with theirs, as theirs are buried with ours in Fallujah," says insurgent commander Abu Saif. It's a sentiment echoed by the Sadrist leaders, who bear scars from dueling with the U.S. "We have many relationships binding us together," says Abu Zainab...
...that he wasn't defeated militarily. Reports from the frontline leave no doubt that U.S. and Iraqi forces were closing in on the shrine, while many Sadrist fighters had already fled. But their "defense" of the most revered of Shiite shrines under fire from a widely loathed "infidel" army has further enhanced Moqtada Sadr's already considerable political standing among Iraqi Shiites - a fact that has led the interim government to stress that even after three weeks of violent defiance, it wants to draw Sadr into the political process, for the simple reason that he's too dangerous to them...
...close as Iraq could get to Vietnam, where the U.S. waged war in defense of a government increasingly bereft of support and legitimacy among its own citizenry. But Allawi may also believe he has no option but to risk the consequences of an offensive to stamp out the Sadrist challenge if he is to establish the authority of the central government, and that delay would only make the task more difficult...