Word: shiing
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Just a dusty mile or so from where a fellow platoon leader was recently killed by a powerful roadside bomb, Army 1st. Lt. James Vansandt piles out of a Humvee and sets out with his Iraqi translator into the darkness toward the crowded main street of Musayyib, a ramshackle Shi'ite town set along the Euphrates River some 40 miles south of Baghdad. Robed men are gathered in clusters on benches and around tables brought out after the daily ritual of breaking the 12-hour Ramadan fast. As his platoon fans out into the shadows on both sides...
...military officers in Iraq often wonder about the possible presence of Iranian operatives in cities south of Baghdad like Karbala and Najaf, two key strongholds for Shi'ite militias thought to have links to Tehran. Many soldiers believe those two cities, home to more than 1.5 million people altogether, are where Shi'ite militants gather, train and arm themselves with help from Iran for attacks against U.S. forces farther north. Some intelligence even suggests that Iran's elite military force, the Revolutionary Guard, has opened training camps in the area for Iraqi guerrillas. But getting a clear picture...
...next spring. Drawing less attention, however, is the extent to which American forces have quietly withdrawn from the rest of southern Iraq. By so doing, the U.S. is ceding huge swaths of territory to shaky provincial governments that have to face increasingly powerful Shi'ite militias very much alone...
Since 2004, American soldiers have treaded lightly in southern Iraq, even though all the territory north of Basra has been ostensibly the responsibility of U.S. forces. An uneasy truce prevailed in the area between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army, the militia headed by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both sides seemed eager to avoid a repeat of the open clashes that erupted in 2004 in Karbala and Najaf, where Sadr's militia holds sway. So U.S. troops generally stayed away...
Outwardly, the main cities in the south are in the hands of Iraqi authorities answering to the central government in Baghdad. In reality, Karbala, Najaf, Basra and the provinces they sit in are now a struggling ground between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, a rival Shi'ite militia also though to have links to Iran. American forces remained on the sidelines as the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade waged bloody campaigns against one another across southern Iraq this summer. On August 28, gunmen from the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade battled in the streets of Karbala...