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Quote by: grandpa It's not all that ironic. Oil companies have been making record profits. This just in: Residents says Iraqi soldiers warn them to leave Sadr City Iraqi soldiers for the first time warned residents in the embattled Sadr City district to leave their houses Thursday, signaling a new push by the U.S.-backed forces against Shiite extremist who have been waging street battles for seven weeks. Iraqi soldiers, using loudspeakers, told residents in some virtually abandoned areas of southeastern Sadr City to go to nearby soccer stadiums, residents said. Grandpa h.

Indeed, a humanitarian disaster in the making. 2.5 million poor people are "warned to leave," that way when they go in (with US air support, of course) and level the place, the excuse for the "collateral damage" all over the place in the rubble will be "they were warned to leave."

Meanwhile we have headlines raving about the arrest of a claimed al Qaeda leader which turns out to be disputed, but manages to get everyone's attention.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is a relatively trivial component of the maelstrom, and its importance is what to the population, compared to being ethnically cleansed?

What's going on is Iraqi politics obfuscated by our own terrorist focus. Sadr represents the poor of Iraq, and they are struggling for a voice in the nation. The poor are far less interconnected with the elites in the government Iran, despite the propaganda we get in the US, and every bit if not more interested in a Iraqi national unity distinct from Iran than the current majority in the government, which consists of Maliki and his weak Da'wa party, and the middle and upper class Shiites, represented by the Islamic Supreme Council and their Iran trained militia, the Badr corp, which has been incorporated into the Iraq Army now as a kind of national guard arm of the army.

Those in the government directing this move into the Sadr slums have close ties to Iran, many were hiding there while Sadr's poor took the brunt of Saddam. We don't get that picture here in US news, instead we get Sadr and his Mahdi Army are an Iranian-armed and backed fanatics. To find these details out you basically have to read Arabic, it won't be in the main stream media in the US. No, the Iraqi Army and the Shiites in the government going in to do this version of cleansing are the folks who are on "our" side.

This is not Sadr and his rabble militia against the US, this is Iraqi political factions trying to work out the composition of their government, but unfortunately with the mixture of militias there, including the recent arming by the US of the Sunnis during the surge, Iraqi politics involves guns. Take the guns away from the protectors of the poor, the Mahdi army, and what is going to happen? Either way, ethnic cleansing by displacing 2.5 million poor people and probably leveling their homes Falluja style, or finding themselves helpless to the inevitable wrath of avenging Sunnis, they probably don't see much in this for themselves.

Iraqi military orders Sadr City residents to evacuate Right now the fields are empty, and families have not come. Um Mohammed, 48, ignored the Iraqi soldiers calling over loudspeakers for residents to leave their homes on Thursday. Earlier this week the Iraqi army dropped fliers around her home that asked residents to turn over Mahdi Army militiamen and cooperate with the government. "The residents here are laughing at the government," she said. "Their demands are very strange. Either hand over our sons or leave our houses to live in small tents." Um Mohammed will stay in her home, she said, even though her neighborhood is beset by gunbattles and sporadic airstrikes. "We refuse to leave," she said. "Our death will be inside our homes."