Word: standoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...muster any significant support on the ground, Chalabi's star has waned as a contender for a top spot. Instead, he has sought to carve out an influential role for himself as a man who can mediate between opposing factions. He sought to help negotiate an end to the standoff between the Americans and Moqtada Sadr's men at Najaf, and has lately been mediating between the Interim Government and the Kurdish leadership over the fate of Kurdish autonomy. Although he has no substantial constituency of his own, an ability to mediate and therefore help manage the fractious politics...
...concede to the principle of Iraqi security forces being under Iraqi government control. That's not as much as a sacrifice as it seems; the manner in which the U.S. military has conducted itself in the wake of Fallujah and in its search for a political solution to the standoff with Sadr supporters suggests that it has no inclination now to launch large-scale offensives. Its mission, increasingly, is safeguarding Iraq's government and infrastructure until such time as those functions can be assumed by Iraqi security forces. The fact that the interim government did not demand that...
...Sadr has experienced a remarkable shift in fortune. A couple of months ago, he was a marginal nuisance. But since launching its uprising in April, his militia has turned southern Iraq into a grinding standoff for the overwhelmingly superior coalition forces. U.S. officials say the Mahdi Army has perhaps 5,000 fighters nationwide, but last Friday there were almost that many in Kufa and nearby Najaf, 6 miles away...
...standoff at Fallujah, U.S. officers recognized that the insurgents, led by former Baathist officers, appeared to have significant popular support in the town. Instead of trying to destroy them, U.S. commanders cut a deal with local Iraqi leaders to put many of the same insurgents in charge of security under the rubric of a new Iraqi security force working in cooperation with the Marines. A number of reports now suggest that a similar deal is about to be struck with the Sadrists. The U.S. would withdraw from the shrine cities, Moqtada Sadr's militia would be turned into a political...
...month-long standoff with Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi militia, however, has thus far defied all efforts at a mediated solution. Fierce clashes provoked by Sadrist fire this week drew the Americans ever closer to fighting outside the sacred shrines in Najaf and Karbala. Sadr appears to be riding on the U.S. campaign against him as a means to eclipse his rivals in the battle for Shiite support. His tactics appear to involve goading the U.S. into increasingly risky actions around the holy sites, and then publicly lambasting Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for failing to act on his warning...