Several other neighborhoods in Baghdad also have reported fighting between the Mahdi militia and Iraqi police and army forces.
Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, has repeatedly stressed that the military campaign he launched in March, backed by American and British forces, was not directed against any one faction, certainly not just the Mahdi militia.
As they neared the besieged house, the Kurdish soldiers shot over the heads of the Shia gunmen, identified by locals as members of the Mahdi militia loyal to a Shia firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr, and told them to leave the area.
Adm Mullen harshly criticised statements by anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr suggesting he would unleash his Mahdi Army militia if US troops stay.
He said today that he would go after the Mahdi Army militia and that he would not stop until all militias in Iraq were disbanded.
Another official in the ministry accused the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr of attacking government security forces in the center of Karbala, site of two Shiite shrines under the control of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council.
He lived in a neighborhood where the Mahdi Army, the militia - and that's the Shiite group in Iraq - had taken over his neighborhood.
In just one example today in the Baghdad neighborhood of Zeyuna, Iraqi national guards were seen cheering and waving on gunmen dressed in black, and these guys are believed to be members of the Mahdi Army, the militia that is loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The Shiites turned to their own militia, the Mahdi Army and to the death squads to protect them, igniting the civil war.
They said that among those groups were radical elements of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr.
Mr Crocker added that Muqtada al-Sadr, perhaps the most powerful anti-American Iraqi Shia leader, has now told his men to stop attacking Iraqis or Americans, prompted perhaps by widespread revulsion at attacks by his militia, the Mahdi Army, on fellow-Shia worshippers in the holy city of Karbala.
The Mahdi Army -- the Shiite militia supported by Iran and under command of Moqtada al Sadr -- is America's enemy and an enemy of Iraq's nascent democracy.
It's clear that the Iranians have been supporting the Mahdi Army or splinters of the Mahdi Army, which is a Shiite militia.
The Sadr forces, the Mahdi Army, feels that the security forces and a rival militia and the U.S. have been taking advantage of the ceasefire and targeting the Sadr militia unfairly.
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