Word: shiing
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...military success against al-Qaeda in Anbar province has led to a certain incoherence in U.S. policy. We are working bottom up, from the tribal grass roots, with the Sunnis ... but top down, and not very successfully, with the Shi'ite majority. According to Crocker, tribes aren't as important among the Shi'ites, who tend to organize themselves in larger structures, especially around two dominant political families, the Sadrs and the Hakims. Each family has a militia. The Sadrs have the Mahdi Army, and the Hakims have the Badr Corps, and these two forces are now at war with...
...southern port city of Basra, the situation is complicated by a third party, Fadhila, which controls the local government. Basra may just be a metaphor for Iraq right now. There is no possible role for the U.S. military in the dispute there. The British are leaving, and the intra-Shi'ite battle is ramping up. The Iranians are trying to play all sides. "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue - as some are now doing - that we need a Basra surge," Crocker told me. "But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have...
...long summer break and after delivery of a situation report by U.S. General David Petraeus, expected in September. Speculation is rife that Britain is heading as fast as possible for the exit. "The British have given up and they know they will be leaving Iraq soon," the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told the British daily The Independent, on Aug. 20. His gleeful tone contrasted with the increasingly irritable mood music in Washington. A British pullout "will be ugly and embarrassing." That was Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and military adviser...
With Nouri al-Maliki's government teetering on the verge of collapse, Baghdad's Green Zone is humming with political maneuverings by Iraqi politicians who want his job. Given the dominance of the Shi'ite coalition in Iraq's legislature, the likelihood remains that the next Prime Minister - like Maliki and his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari - will come from within its ranks. And that fact alone means there's little likelihood of a major change in Iraqi government policies - bad news for the Bush Administration. Here's a look at the front-runners and the wild cards...
...Shi'ite coalition's most likely candidate is Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a French-trained economist and political chameleon. Having been, at various points in his career, a communist, a Ba'athist and a secular liberal democrat, he has switched directions so many times it's hard to know which way he's going. These days, Abdul-Mahdi represents the Shi'ite-fundamentalist Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), which, like Maliki's Dawa Party, is beholden to Tehran. Twice in the past two years, Abdul-Mahdi has told journalists he was on the verge of quitting the SIIC to form...