Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militiamen slowly resurface

[unhappycamper]

Supporters of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr, some wearing white shrouds, signaling they are ready for martyrdom, in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. Though Sadr has demobilized his militia, it reserves the right to take up arms against "occupiers."

Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militiamen slowly resurface
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times
June 28, 2010

Reporting from Baghdad — Mohammad and his gang are back. There may not be a Glock semiautomatic strapped to his waist anymore, but the terrifying mystique of the Mahdi Army still shrouds the Shiite Muslim militiaman like the menacing black uniform he once wore.

Civil servant Haidar Naji remembers how Mohammad used to strut around his east Baghdad neighborhood like a mob boss, ordering him not to wear Bermuda shorts, too immodest and Western for his Islamic tastes.

Naji changed into longer pants.

He felt satisfaction in 2008 when he heard Mohammad, whose last name he never knew, and his friends had been rounded up and imprisoned, a well-deserved comeuppance after the militia's years of kidnapping, torturing and killing Iraqis, and dread this year when he saw them back on the streets, a little more polite, but with the same righteous attitude.

"We're seeing their mobility, their presence, in the mosques, in their gatherings, in the alleyways," said Naji, a resident of Habibiya, a poor Shiite district next to vast, impoverished Sadr City, a Mahdi Army stronghold.

[SoCalDem]

1. I said it in 2003.. He will be the "new saddam"

"The people" want a strongman to compete with the neighboring strongmen. Democracy sounds like a nice idea, until it means they cannot just take something they want from a weaker neighbor, or when laws cramp their style.

Clannish/tribal societies are just what middle eastern societies want. they want clearly defined lines of power.. they need to know who's IN and who's OUT. Elections sound all warm & fuzzy, but if the people do not fall in line behind the "winner", you have nothing but simmering chaos.

People forget that until the "westerners" came along & developed the oil in the middle east, these societies had been chugging along doing their own thing for millennia. We NEEDED to change them and their leaders to enable US to plunder their oil (which they personally had little use for at that time). Once they figured out how they had been cheated, it's no surprise that they rose up and threw us out & kept the money for themselves. They have never "liked" us or our ways, and at every opportunity, they readjust to their own old ways..whether we approve or not.