Word: ragtag
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...ites against him. But last week's offensive showed that the military can't wait much longer for al-Sadr's rivals to take matters into their own hands. "Frankly, they're not killing his people as quickly as we'd like," a U.S. officer says. Al-Sadr's ragtag army poses little military challenge--U.S. forces killed scores of pro--al-Sadr militants in the course of the week--but the offensive could still incite popular outrage at the U.S. if al-Sadr draws U.S. forces into bloody street battles that do extensive damage to Shi'ite holy sites...
Plenty of people have an interest in seeing al-Sadr and his ragtag army cut down. The cleric has little widespread support among mainstream Shi'ites. But al-Sadr's rise has alarmed senior Shi'ite clerics, who view him as an upstart demagogue. Al-Sadr's troops have regularly clashed with the more powerful Shi'ite militia known as the Badr Brigade. Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the most prominent Shi'ite leader in Iraq, has ordered all Shi'ite factions to avoid further confrontation with al-Sadr's men, fearing it would lead to fratricidal Shi'ite violence...
Chalabi's fall from grace began the moment he arrived in Iraq. An exile for almost 46 of his 59 years, Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite, had no constituency inside the country. When the CIA refused to provide weapons to his ragtag band of mercenaries, the Pentagon armed them over the agency's objections. Within days of their arrival, some of Chalabi's forces claimed houses, buildings, document caches and vehicles in Baghdad that belonged to the former regime. Eventually the U.S. disarmed those members of the militia it could still track down. Among Iraqis, Chalabi, dogged by charges that...
...hippie with a resume that listed fire breather and accordion player transform a ragtag band of Quebecois buskers into a $500 million entertainment juggernaut? "Childlike naivete," says Laliberte, the company's puckish owner, CEO and co-founder. His impact is hard to underestimate. "Every circus I see around the world has some influence in style of the Cirque du Soleil," says Ernest Albrecht, author of The New American Circus. Cirque has also sparked interest in vaudeville, acrobatics and street performance. Up next: another Vegas show, premiering in September, a new touring show for 2005 and possibly, down the road, even...
They were a bunch of nobodies with too few gloves to go around, a single base and no bat; a ragtag group with no experience, no skill and no hope...