Relations Sour Between Shiites and Iraq Militia

By SABRINA TAVERNISE : October 12, 2007

BAGHDAD, Oct. 11 — In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.
The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war. The sectarian landscape has shifted, with Sunni extremists largely defeated in many Shiite neighborhoods, and the war in those places has sunk into a criminality that is often blind to sect. see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/world/middleeast/12mahdi.html?_r=1&th=&oref=login&emc=th&pagewanted=print