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Excerpt - BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two key members of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political and military organization were gunned down just days before the U.S. and Iraqi forces planned to open a massive security drive in Baghdad. Ali Khazim, who ran al-Sadr's political organization in volatile Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, was killed Sunday by U.S. forces at his home in Howaider village, 12 miles east of Baqouba, Saleh al-Ageili, a spokesman for the Sadr Movement's parliamentary bloc, said on Monday. Provincial police confirmed al-Ageili's account. "What has happened to Khazim is part of the series of provocative...

Iraq: more than 600 militiamans Shiites of Sadr placed in detention BAGHDAD - the Iraqi forces of safety and the multinational Force stopped more than 600 militiamans of the Army of Mahdi, of the radical chief Moqtada Sadr Shiite, who wait to be judged by the Iraqi government, announced Monday the American army. More than 16 frameworks placed high of this militia were stopped and one of them was killed, specified the army in an official statement. Five of these frameworks are commanders of groups armed in the popular district Shiite with Sadr City, in the east of Baghdad,...

Excerpt - A Kurdish army brigade in northern Iraq was undergoing intensive urban combat training as it readied for deployment in the latest Baghdad security operation and was expected to take on the capital's Mahdi Army Shiite militia, its commander said on Saturday. Meanwhile, three Iraqi generals told The Associated Press that the Iraqi commander who will lead the overall Baghdad security mission was the government's second choice and only got the job after the U.S. military objected to the first officer named to the post by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In the northern city of Irbil, Brig. Gen. Nazir...

Iraq: a close relation of the radical leader Moqtada Sadr Shiite killed in Najaf NAJAF (Iraq) - the partisans of the radical leader Moqtada Sadr Shiite showed Wednesday the American army to have killed Tuesday evening in Najaf (southern of Iraq) important directing movement sadrist, which a spokesman of the American quota contradicted. “Of the American soldiers took by storm this night the residence of Saheb Al-Ameri in a southern district of Najaf (160 km in the south of Baghdad)”, declared in AFP the chief of the police force of the city, the general Abdul Karim Mustafa. “They killed...

Headline: Shiite militiamen clash with Iraqi forces south of Baghdad; 40 people killed This spells trouble, maybe, but maybe not. The government forces are standing, fighting, and actually bringing in reinforcements to fight some more. Good news. The bad news is that Iraq is probably going to have to experience a 'civil war' to actually become a truly functional nation-state. This is the opening salvo of the civil war among the Shiites. The sides in this war is what really makes this interesting. There are multiple personalities here. The Sadr wing of the Shiites are the ones backed by Iran...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Just three weeks after rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces blew off his legs with a homemade bomb, Capt. Saeed Majeed returned to duty to set an example for the men he commands at an Iraqi national guard station in one of the deadliest districts in Baghdad. After American allies accidentally killed two popular Iraqi platoon leaders in a fight with al-Sadr's militia, it was Majeed who persuaded his troops to end their strike over the incident. And it was Majeed who consoled his outgunned and outsmarted men after a 20-year-old guardsman died recently in yet another...