Posted on 07/23/2008 3:46:19 PM PDT by flyfree
There is an interesting piece of graffiti on a bridge near Basra. A fleeing militiaman has scrawled “We'll be back”; underneath an Iraqi soldier has scribbled in reply “And we'll be waiting for you”.
The Shia militias, the Jaish al- Mahdi, who controlled large parts of Basra until March this year, has now gone and instead the city is firmly under the grip of Iraq's new security forces, in whom the coalition has invested so much training. They re-established control in April, in an operation romantically named “The Charge of the Knights”, systematically clearing the city with British and American support, confiscating illegal weapons and arresting the violent gangs whose combination of criminality and vicious extremism was making life a misery for so many of Basra's people.
Around the city the posters of religious leaders are being replaced with billboards advertising cars and mobile phones and photographs of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who is rightly credited with being the driving force behind the army's crackdown. You see the symbol of The Charge of the Knights everywhere, a black horse carrying the flag of Iraq trampling the gangsters underfoot.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Great article.
Good news Bump
Oh yeah, it was!
I like that.
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