Episode 18: The Mahdi Army
The Mahdi Army, also known as the Mahdi Militia or Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) (Arabic جيش المهدي), is an Iraqi paramilitary force created by the Iraqi Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in June 2003.
On April 4, 2004, the group spearheaded the first major armed confrontation against the U.S.-led occupation forces in Iraq from the Shi'ite community in an uprising that followed the banning of al-Sadr's newspaper and attempts to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. This fight lasted until a truce on June 6 when Muqtada al-Sadr ordered fighters of the Mahdi army to go into a ceasefire unless attacked first. The truce broke down in August 2004 after provocative actions by the Mahdi Army, with new hostilities erupting.
The group is armed with various light weapons, including improvised explosive devices, also called road-side bombs. Many of the bombs used during attacks on Iraqi Security Forces and Coalition Forces have used infra-red sensors as triggers, a technique that was used widely by the IRA in Northern Ireland in the early to mid 1990s.
Read more about this topic: International Terrorism Since 1945
Famous quotes containing the words episode and/or army:
“Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)