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BAGHDAD, April 21 (Reuters) - A missile struck the central Baghdad headquarters of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council on Monday, said an official for the party, which is the main rival of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr for control of Shi'ite areas. The official, whose party is the biggest Shi'ite group in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, was unable to give any details on possible casualties. Sadr's Mehdi Army fighters have launched missile and mortar strikes across Baghdad since Maliki ordered a crackdown on them a month ago. Many of those missiles and mortar bombs have struck the Green Zone...

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will consult senior religious leaders and disband his Mehdi Army militia if they instruct him to, a senior aide said on Monday. The surprise announcement was the first time Sadr has proposed dissolving the Mehdi Army, one of the principle actors in Iraq's five-year-old conflict and the main opponent of U.S. and Iraqi forces during a recent upsurge in fighting. It came on the day Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in a television interview, ordered the Mehdi Army to disband or Sadr's followers would be excluded from Iraqi political life. Senior aide...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Iraqi military push into the southern city of Basra is not going as well as American officials had hoped, despite President Bush's high praise for the operation, several U.S. officials said Friday. A closely held U.S. military intelligence analysis of the fighting in Basra shows that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of the city, according to officials in both the United States and Iraq, and Basra's police units are deeply infiltrated by members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army. "This is going to go on for a while," one U.S. military...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia ordered shops to close in some Baghdad neighborhoods on Monday in what they said was the start of a "civil disobedience campaign." The show of force by the feared militia, which the U.S. military once called the greatest threat to peace in Iraq, alarmed residents, but leaders of Sadr's political bloc in parliament stressed that it was a peaceful protest. The militia has kept a low profile since Sadr called a ceasefire last August and extended it last month, a move U.S. commanders say has helped to sharply reduce...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi police raided strongholds of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army in the southern city of Kut on Wednesday after the militia broke a ceasefire and clashed with security forces a day earlier. The city's police chief said at least 11 people were killed in Tuesday's gunbattles in which U.S. special forces called in air strikes after Iraqi authorities asked them for help. With U.S. forces already stretched by an upsurge in violence in Iraq since January, such ceasefire violations are a worrying development. U.S. commanders have credited the ceasefire with sharply reducing sectarian bloodshed that threatened...

Lebanon's Hizbullah has trained Shiite fighters from Iraq in advanced guerrilla warfare tactics, according to Mehdi army fighters who have been confronting British forces in the south of the country. Members of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia told The Independent they had received instruction from from Hizbullah. One Iraqi militiaman, named only as Abu Muhannad, said he had spent a month in Southern Lebanon. "I was one of the experienced fighters from the Mehdi army to go for training there," he said. "We learned how to take advantage of an armoured vehicle's weakness, and how to wait and kill the soldiers who...

Shi'ite militiamen, who melted away from Baghdad when U.S. and Iraqi troops began their security crackdown seven weeks ago, are rolling back into the city with fresh Iranian training, Iraqi and other officials said. It is not clear whether the radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is in control of the newly trained group, which some Iraqis describe as a "secret army" trained and equipped by Iran. Videotapes and other evidence of Iranian propaganda have been found on people recently detained in Sadr City, said a member of one of the multiple Iraqi and U.S. security forces trying to return security...

The music said it all — Mookie’s boys were back in town. U.S. Army Capt. Bruce Beardsley and his civil affairs team had barely stepped from their Humvees in this dust-blown quarter of New Baghdad recently when a bank of speakers stacked beside a tattered market began blaring a Mahdi Army militia chant. “It’s their version of Psyops (psychological operations),” said Beardsley, a 38-year-old reservist and Maryland police officer. The militia’s return has been marked by a recent spike in roadside bomb attacks aimed at U.S. troops, as well as a rocket or mortar attack on a nearby forward operating...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Angry fellow Shi'ites stoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's motorcade in a Shi'ite stronghold of Baghdad on Sunday in a display of fury over a devastating car bomb that tore through their area. Maliki was visiting the Sadr City slum to pay respects to some of the 202 victims of last week's devastating bombing. "It's all your fault!" one man shouted as, in unprecedented scenes, a hostile crowd began to surge around the premier and then jeered as his armored convoy edged through the throng away from a mourning ceremony. The area is a base for the...

One way to understand Moqtada al-Sadr is to think of him as a young Mafia don. He aims for respectability, and is willing to kill for it. Yet the extent of his power isn't obvious to the untrained eye. He has no standing army or police force, and the Mahdi Army gunmen he employs have no tanks or aircraft. You could mistake him—at your peril—for a common thug or gang leader. And if he or his people were to kill you for your ignorance, he wouldn't claim credit. But the message would be clear to those who understand the brutal...

The Iraq inner facsistic massacres are not just "sectarian". Nor is Iran's playground: Lebanon a local "conflict". http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1222824,00.htmlTIME.com:How the Hizballah Factor Will Determine an Iraq Civil ... http://onthescene.msnbc.com/baghdad/2006/03/sunni_vs_shiite.html Sunni VS Shiite, or rather, Iran VS Iraq? http://www.meib.org/articles/0404_iraq1.htm "Iran, Sadr, and the Shiite Uprising in Iraq" (April 2004) http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,124835,00.html Iran presses Shi'ites to step up Iraq attacks - Times | Top News http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-12T045657Z_01_N12291036_RTRUK OC_0_UK-IRAQ-IRAN.xml Iranian Intel Officers Captured in Iraq - US & World http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2310725 ABC News: US: Iraqi Shiites Get Help From Iran http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/11/business/iraq.php Iran stokes Iraq unrest, US says - Africa & Middle East ... http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/al-sadr.htm Iran's Al-Madi army

At least 18 Iraqis were killed on Sunday after U.S. troops clashed with a Shi'ite militia, medics and police said. Police said the clashes erupted after the Mehdi Army militia loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr tried to stop U.S. troops from entering a mosque. A medic said 18 bodies were found around the mosque. A senior aide to Sadr accused U.S. troops of killing more than 20 unarmed worshippers during evening prayers at a Sadr mosque in east Baghdad. Police and residents said there were clashes involving Sadr's Mehdi Army militia fighters after U.S. troops raided the mosque in east...

<p>BREAKING: Hibhib village, Iraqi soldiers arrested 20 terrorists.</p> <p>BREAKING: Forward Operating Base Remagen, with Operation Swarmer, American heroes in helicopters.</p> <p>BREAKING: Basra- Market of military equipment, helping terrorist murders Al Anbar province, weapons found Baquba - Iraqi soldiers take terrorists Basra - Brave Brits in security operation Beiji - Operation 'Cordon and Knock' Najaf - Mehdi Army protects terrorist Moqtada Sadr Ramadi - Operation 'Band of Brothers', American and Iraqi heroes after bombings killed 64 people Tikrit - U.S. Army and Iraqi heroes on a 'knock and search' mission Victory base complex - Iraqis at their "hand over ceremony"</p>

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...

Students are beaten to death for playing music as Shia militiamen run amok THE students had begun to lay out their picnic in the spring sunshine when the men attacked. “There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park,” Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra, said. “They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music and that this was against Islam. “They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating...

THE students had begun to lay out their picnic in the spring sunshine when the men attacked. “There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park,” Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra, said. “They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music and that this was against Islam. “They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating us with their sticks and rifle butts.” Two students were said to have...

BAGHDAD, Oct 12 (AFP) - The US commander for Baghdad's Sadr City professed "cautious optimism" Tuesday over a peace initiative with Shiite rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr's militia, but warned that breakaway factions of the radical movement were refusing to comply. "I'm cautiously optimistic for a couple of reasons. One, we've never before had an initiative announced with the endorsement of Moqtada Sadr to disarm and disband... They'll generally listen to him," Colonel Abe Abrams told AFP. "And so that's a good sign. But it's just a sign. It's not a turning point. It's a starting point. It's not a dramatic...

NAJAF, Iraq (AFP) - US forces smashed through militia defences, trapping Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army inside their shrine bastion and prompting Iraq's Shiite spiritual leader to head back home to lead a bid to "save Najaf". After three weeks of intense fighting, US planes fired three missiles within metres (yards) of the revered Imam Ali mausoleum, shattering windows inside its ornate galleries and sending up clouds of dust, an AFP correspondent said Wednesday. US armoured vehicles held the shrine in a pincer grip from the west and east, pounding the south with heavy artillery fire as snipers fired on all...

The Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism urges Arab and Muslim leaders to provide moral support to the new Iraqi government in its bid to defeat Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army. It has been more than a year since the invasion of Iraq. Some were for the war and some were against the war. However, continuing to argue about whether the war was justified is now moot and not constructive. No matter what is one’s view about the invasion of Iraq, the Arab and Muslim world must now agree that a stable, prosperous Iraq is in everyone’s best interest. The...

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The movement of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr announced its refusal to take part in a national conference lined up for July to select an advisory body for Iraq's interim government. "We reject the invitation," close Sadr aide Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani told AFP. "We have examined the invitation over the past three days and reached the conclusion that it does not take into account enough the importance of our movement," he said. On Monday, the chief organiser for the conference said that nobody had yet been officially invited, contradicting an earlier announcement that the firebrand cleric had...