Word: truceful
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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...
Last weekend Sadr and the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, announced a truce. In a statement aired with much publicity, the two leaders pledged to cease violence. Whether the pact holds remains to be seen, especially in Basra. Tensions between the two factions there have lately been especially high following the British pullout to the airport outside the city. Regardless, U.S. forces are unlikely to play a meaningful role in shaping the outcome. With no evident plans to reenter southern areas, the U.S.-led coalition leaves the fate of some of Iraq's most...
...militias supported by Iran. The attack killed, by the U.S. military's count, 30 men allegedly involved in receiving weapons and training from Iran. Attacks of that scale in the militia's stronghold are not unheard of, but they are rare. Since the two sides declared a truce in 2004, the Americans - mindful of the militia's power and of the political clout its political wing wields in the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - have tried to limit the Mahdi Army's influence without provoking an all-out confrontation...
...danger remains that they're less akin to Ivory Coast's example of rapprochement than they are to the legendary Christmas 1914 soccer match on World War I's Western Front. That game, played between German and British soldiers in no man's land amid a remarkable unofficial yuletide truce, expressed the shared humanity among the combatants of both sides. And then they went back to slaughtering each other for another four years...
...Mexican officials confirm that Mexico's major rival drug-trafficking organizations, the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels, "may be trying to negotiate a truce" and come to some agreement over control of territory, says a knowledgeable U.S. official. The two mafias could be coming to the table for two key reasons. First, "the violence has drawn too much attention and has really begun to hurt [their drug-trafficking] business," says Steven Robertson, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And second, Mexican President Felipe Calderon's popular but oft-questioned strategy of throwing the military at the cartels - some...