Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When word of the kidnappings reached the control room of the Ministry of the Interior, an officer on duty there suspected immediately that the perps were acting on the orders of a fearsome Shi'ite militia warlord whose deeds the officer had been tracking for three years. "A ministry of mainly Sunni staff, 150 people taken captive--it can only be one thing," he says. "It had to be the work of Abu Deraa...
...than half of the 150 abductees were released, many remain unaccounted for.) Abu Deraa has a personal fondness for gruesome torture. One of his signature techniques is running a drill into the skull of his live victim. His appetite for mayhem is so vast that Iraqis call him the "Shi'ite Zarqawi"; and like the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader, who was killed by a U.S. air strike last June, Abu Deraa has largely operated in the shadows, avoiding public appearances and almost never giving interviews...
...Mahdi Army after the dictator's fall. "When the Americans entered the country and kicked Saddam out, we were very happy," Abu Deraa says. "But then we discovered their bad intentions against Iraq, so we started attacking the occupation forces." In the spring of 2004 he participated in the Shi'ite uprising against U.S. forces in Sadr City. That was also when he earned his nom de guerre Abu Deraa, or "Father of the Shield," a reference to his penchant for attacking U.S. armored vehicles...
...city (in addition to the tens of thousands of police), they have, with remarkable consistency, managed not to be where they are needed most. Despite the weekend-long curfew, supposedly enforced by the Iraqi forces, there seemed little by way of security forces activity restricting the movement of Shi'ite mobs seeking vengeance for the Sadr City bombings...
...Iraqi Army was conspicuously absent, for example, in the Hurriya neighborhood, where rampaging Shi'ite militias damaged Sunni mosques and allegedly immolated worshipers. In Hurriya and elsewhere, many Iraqis reported that the Iraqi soldiers either melted away when the militias arrived - or worse, stood by and watched as they attacked Sunnis. The Shi'ite-majority Iraqi police are frequently accused of joining in the killing of Sunnis...