Word: militiamen
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...have been under siege since April, when Iraqi security forces backed by American troops began clashing in the area with fighters from the Mahdi Army militia led by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. For weeks gun battles and air strikes came almost every day in Sadr City as soldiers and militiamen faced off in a stalemated battle at the edge of the district, which is the Mahdi Army's stronghold. A hastily arranged truce between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Sadr halted the fighting last week. Under the agreement, Iraqi forces are now allowed to enter Sadr City...
Surrounded by a ring of mountains like a concert band shell, Beirut has great acoustics. So the roiling street battles on May 8 between Hizballah militiamen and supporters of the Lebanese government echoed through the city with a drumroll of rocket explosions and a chorus of machine-gun fire that sounded like the symphonic overture to civil war. When an early-summer thunderstorm began that night, it seemed as if the heavens themselves were taking up the ominous theme...
Hizballah's victory was hardly a surprise. Its Shi'ite militiamen, who number in the thousands and are armed by Syria and Iran, have survived battle with the mighty Israeli army, while the supporters of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government are poorly armed amateurs on neighborhood patrol. Neither the police nor the military--which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training from the U.S.--dared to lift a finger against Hizballah. Long after the militiamen had withdrawn from the streets, the army said it would intervene in any ongoing clashes but added that it would...
...siege of Sadr City, now more than a month old, represents a significant shift politically for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had aligned himself with the Sadrists for a time. But since March, Maliki has kept up attacks on Sadr's militiamen in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Early setbacks such as Iraq army defections and battlefield defeats in Basra have so far not seemed to dim Maliki's determination to continue the fight. With reporting by Mazin Ezzat
...have stalled, and it remains unclear what picture will be revealed in Basra in the coming days following the supposed gains by Iraqi troopers. Iraqi security forces have yet to land a major blow against al-Sadr's militia, and reports of defection and retreats by Iraqi troopers fighting militiamen continue to circulate...