Word: shying
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...Iraqis digested the news of their government's major military offensive against the Mahdi Army in Basra, there were mixed reactions. There was anger and resentment among poor, long-oppressed Shi'ites, like the 2 million residents of Baghdad's massive Sadr City slum, for whom the black-clad Mahdi militia are heroes providing protection from Sunni terrorists and civic services like medical clinics and free schools. Their leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, has called for nationwide protests, and his supporters have clashed with Iraqi and American forces in several cities. Security forces are bracing for massive protests in Sadr City...
This week's violence in Baghdad and Basra followed several days of bloodshed in the Shi'ite city of Kut, some 100 miles southeast of the capital, where Sadr loyalists clashed with police forces largely controlled by their Shi'ite rivals, the Badr Corps militants of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq, and with government troops affiliated with Maliki's Da'awa party...
...This was expected. It was just a matter of timing," said Vali Nasr, Tufts University scholar and author of the bestselling book, The Shi'a Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. "The ceasefire and the surge allowed everyone to regroup and rearm. There is still the Shi'a-Sunni conflict. There is still the Sadr-Badr conflict. The surge and the ceasefire merely kept them apart, but there has never been a real political settlement," he said. "No, the big battle for Iraq hasn't been fought yet. The future of Iraq has not been determined." Nasr...
...want to be in," said Anthony Cordesman, a top Iraq analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Cordesman warns against jumping to conclusions that the south is rising up. He says it's more likely that the recent violence is a sign that the many Shi'ite factions that have broken from Sadr's movement are seeking to prove their mettle, and that al-Qaeda cells are seeking new ways to strike as they are forced out of more and more areas by U.S. and Iraqi forces...
...leading U.S. forces in Iraq for the past 15 months, recently reported that Sadr seemed to be softening and his movement becoming more of a faith-based political movement than a militia waiting to kill Americans or take power by force. That said, Odierno expressed concern over the growing Shi'ite rivalries. "I worry about intra-Shi'a violence a bit," he said upon returning to the Pentagon earlier this month. "That could, you know, spiral out of control...