Word: militiamen
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...refusing to discuss the fighting with his visitors and instead handed out fragrant gardenia blooms plucked from the mosque's garden. Sitting among the soldiers were several civilians wearing bandoliers of ammunition and carrying a variety of automatic rifles. They were local Lebanese villagers, many of them ex-militiamen from Lebanon's 16-year civil war, who had volunteered to fight the militants alongside the army. "No sleep for three days," said one militiaman with a grim smile...
...only as effective as the guards manning its gates, and Sunnis have every reason to mistrust the men who would hold the keys to their neighborhood. Several months ago, in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, a series of smaller concrete barriers was supposed to separate Shi'ite militiamen in the north from Sunni insurgents in the south. But the access points were manned by unreliable members of the Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi security forces. They allowed militiamen to pass through, attack Sunnis, and then flee north again. The checkpoints were mostly useful as a way to slow the pursuit...
...Americans. They have the upper hand in Baghdad. They outnumber Sunnis and control the national government. They have a de facto ally in the United States, which has little choice but to support the "Iraqi Security Forces" even though those forces are often little more than Shi'ite militiamen in government uniforms...
...repeatedly complained that he was being sidelined by the prime minister and his top aides. He recently told an interviewer that his authority did not exceed that of a junior government employee. And he also differed publicly with al-Maliki over a mass kidnapping of Sunnis by purported Shiite militiamen in July, saying that Shiite-dominated security forces had been to blame for failing to maintain order...
...Sunni parties boycotted the poll, allowing a Shi'ite coalition to sweep to power. With an assertiveness that at times bordered on arrogance, the Shi'ite-led government inflamed Sunni resentment. An especially sore point was the mass recruitment into the police and the military of Shi'ite militiamen, some of whom used the immunity of their uniforms to avenge old grudges against Sunnis. Sunni terrorism groups stepped up their bombing campaign, which convinced Shi'ites that the former ruling class was never going to accept its reduced status. By the time U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad persuaded Sunni parties...