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US military intelligence sources tell ABC News that large shipments of weapons have been smuggled to Iraqi militia over the past five weeks, including dozens of Iranian supplied EFP's , or Explosive Form Projectiles, highly effective against armored vehicles. The weapons were sent to Moqtada al Sadr's Shi'a militia, known as "Mahdi’s Army" who control Sadr City, a slum in northern Baghdad with a population of 2 million. US and Iraqi intelligence units on the ground detected the shipments which are believed to be of Iranian origin. In addition, US military sources tell ABC, Al Sadr has been working on...

A NEW offensive against Iraq's Mahdi Army - a militia blamed for sectarian death squad killings - is to be launched by the United States and Britain, it was claimed yesterday. US-led forces are to target the organisation, led by the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, after the Pentagon described it as the biggest threat to Iraq's security. Diplomats say Washington is impatient to confront its key figures. Several officials in the Shiite political parties that dominate the unity government of the prime minister, Nuri al- Maliki, are also losing patience with Sadr's supporters and predict more raids like last week's...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 — A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr. The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said. Iran has facilitated the link between Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq, the official said. Syrian officials have also cooperated, though there is debate about...

A kidnapping ring has demanded a $250,000 ransom from the family of the U.S. soldier abducted in Iraq, a suspiciously low sum that his family worries could be a sign that he is no longer alive. The Pentagon Thursday confirmed for the first time that Specialist Ahmed al-Taie, a Michigan National Guardsman assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Team Baghdad, has been "unaccounted for" since Oct. 23 at 4:30pm; he is currently listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown." Family members of the 41-year-old Iraqi-American from Ann Arbor, Mich. say he was nabbed by a gang claiming to be from the...

Hamas Watch: Analysis and Quotes Hamas—The Islamic Resistance Movement of Palestine Yehudit Barsky - February 2006 Movement Cannot Feed Society on Resistance AloneThe Forward - Eran Lerman - February 3, 2006 Iran's Gaza FrontThe New York Sun - Yehudit Barsky - January 27, 2006 CATEGORY QUOTE TERRORISM "Hamas will be active in the resistance as well as in the political domain. There is no contradiction."1 TERRORISM "If you do not vote Hamas, God will punish you at the end."2 TERRORISM "The Americans and Europeans say to Hamas: either you have weapons or you enter the legislative council. We say weapons...

BAGHDAD, Oct 21 (KUNA) -- A US helicopter on Saturday bombed an office of Al-Sadr militia in Suwaira, 45 kilometers south of Baghdad, witnesses said. Witnesses told Kuwait News Agency (KUNA) that a US helicopter fired four missiles on the militia's office, noting that a number of militiamen were killed and wounded in the bombing, but the presence of Iraqi and US forces made it impossible to figure a death toll.

Operating between the insurgent Sunni Arab suburbs of Baghdad and the Shiite militia-dominated south, Col. Salam al-Mamuri and his Scorpion commando team were a rarity among Iraqi security forces, American and Iraqi colleagues said: a police unit fighting on both sides of the country's sectarian divide. Mamuri's comparative evenhandedness enforcing the law may have earned him an enemy within his own sect, the Shiites. Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani in Baghdad called it a "possibility and a probability" that the assassination was at least in part an inside job, because the killer was able to gain access to Mamuri's office to...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces strike the Baghdad base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — but his gunmen hold their fire. U.S. soldiers kill 15 of al-Sadr's followers, drawing little more than a few perfunctory complaints. That's a dramatic departure in style for the youthful firebrand, who launched two major uprisings against the American-led coalition two years ago when U.S. authorities closed his newspaper and pushed an Iraqi judge into issuing an arrest warrant against him. If anything, al-Sadr is more powerful today than he was then. But that power is also a restraint: al-Sadr has more...

Civil war is the most likely outcome in Iraq, Britain's outgoing ambassador in Baghdad has warned, in a confidential memo to ministers obtained by the BBC. William Patey, who left the Iraqi capital last week, also predicted the break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines. He did also say that "the position is not hopeless" - but said Iraq would remain "messy and difficult" for the next five to 10 years. The Foreign Office said it did not comment on leaked documents. However, it added: "Every day the capacity of the Iraqi security forces to manage their own security is...

In a recent intelligence report, Western analysts suggested that while international attention is focused on Iranian nuclear ambitions, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is covertly destablising southern Iraq. If so, the primary objective is to undermine British control in Basra. Western intelligence agencies have long claimed that the IRGC is providing support for the al-Mahdi Army headed by militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Tehran is also actively aiding the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. These are the principal militias of the Shia communities in the south of the country and are now among...

March 30, 2006: The March 26 raid, on a kidnapping gang hideout, turned into an embarrassing media circus for the radical Shia Arab militia led by pro-Iran cleric Moqtada al Sadr. The Sadr people promptly came up with photos and interviews asserting that the raid (by Kurdish police commandoes) actually hit a mosque and killed sixteen innocent worshipers. About fifty Iraqi police were involved in the operation, accompanied by 25 American troops (some of them advisors to the police unit.)

BAGHDAD, Iraq – As reports from media continued to focus on an Iraqi Special Operations raid in Adhamiyah, Coalition Forces emphasized that no forces entered or damaged any mosque in the Sunday actions. Soldiers from the 1st and 2nd Battalions, 1st Iraqi Special Operations Forces Brigade, conducted a coordinated operation in northeast Baghdad Sunday to capture and detain insurgents responsible for kidnapping and execution activities. “The building complex that was attacked was blocks away from the Mustafa Mosque,” said Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commanding general, Multi-National Corps - Iraq . “This operation was led by Iraqis who confirmed that this...

al-Iraqiya TV quickly aired images of the dead inside the al-Moustafa mosque. All of the dead appear to have been either Mahdi Army fighters or persons in the mosque killed in the crossfire. Zeyad shares a translation of part of what he saw on Iraqi television at Healing Iraq. al-Iraqiya and al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army appear quite chummy. The al-Iraqiya cameraman refers to the Madhi Army dead as “our guys”. Someone in the background was asking the cameraman to film grenades lying around the corpses, to which the cameraman responded: “I can’t show our guys’ grenades.” “No, these are American grenades,”...

BAGHDAD, Feb 28 (Reuters) - Look in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every police, military or militia checkpoint they may run into. "This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to police, and I have the American press pass and my ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on Friday but it hasn't arrived yet," said one Iraqi driver working for a foreign media organisation. "I am Sunni so these passes mean I don't...

Watching the ball drop, twirling a noisemaker, kissing your sweetheart, and making a resolution that rarely comes to pass -- everyone looks forward to the memory of a new year. But one group will be ringing in the New Year a little differently…through a children’s jihad retreat, with a guest speaker who exalts terrorists and another who is linked to al-Qaeda. The majority of Islamic organizations within the United States have, at one time or another, been cited for their connections to terrorism, whether by support of terror groups or through actual terrorist activity carried out by its members. Two...

Basra, Iraq - The most powerful and feared institution here in southern Iraq's largest city is a shadowy force of 200 to 300 police officers known collectively as the Jameat, who dominate the local police and who are said to murder and torture at will. They answer to the leaders of Basra's sectarian militias. The militia infiltration in Basra's police force and government goes far beyond the Jameat. But it may be the most ominous example of the degree to which militias dominate Basra. The extent of Jameat's power became clear in September when British troops in armored vehicles tried...

BASRA, Iraq (Reuters) - British troops seized 12 men, including members of the Iraqi police, during overnight raids in Basra on suspicion of involvement in deadly attacks on foreign troops, the military said on Friday. Some of the detainees are also linked to militia groups, a British commander in the area said. Sources in rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's office in the southern Iraqi city said those detained were mostly Sadr supporters. "In the past two months, eight multi-national force soldiers and six coalition members have been killed by terrorists in Basra province," Brigadier John Lorimer said in a statement....

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide car bomber struck an Interior Ministry convoy in Baghdad on Sunday, killing seven police commandos and two civilians. Earlier, a bomb mounted on a bicycle blew apart a music store in Hillah, south of the capital, killing one, officials said. In the early morning, U.S. and Iraqi forces clashed with gunmen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, killing at least eight Iraqis in an east Baghdad slum. The clash was certain to heighten tensions between U.S. and Iraqi security forces and followers of al-Sadr, who is building opposition to the country's new constitution, which...

BASRA, Iraq, March 28 - Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing. That melee on March 15 and its fallout have redrawn the debate that has...

...[A] number of disparate, but related, events indicate that the political and military momentum is shifting to the Coalition and Iraqi side.... NATO forces: In a significant diplomatic victory last Wednesday, the NATO defense ministers, meeting in Romania, agreed to increase the group's military training contingent in Iraq from 40 to 300 by year's end. The new military advisers (most likely initially from Denmark and Norway) will be deployed to a center outside Baghdad to train Iraqi military officers. The NATO trainers will help boost the number of Iraqi forces from the current 100,000 to a projected 145,000 by next...