The Ultimate Sadrist Spin

"Muqtada al-Sadr throws down his arms at Maliki’s feat in the last act of his months-old saga of surrender; he officially disbands the Mahdi Army to everyone’s disbelief, including mine, yet the Washington Post chose to interpret his submission as a reactivation of his militia.

In a story bylined under the names Amit Paley and Karen De Young that ran as the WaPo’s lead front-page copy today, it is alleged that Sadr has created a new armed wing of the Mahdi Army militia that is tasked with attacking U.S. targets in Iraq.

I read Sadr’s directive yesterday: I have to admit that I dismissed it as a forgery, seeing that it appeared on an anti-Sadrist website that had peddled forged statements attributed to Sadr in the past. Not only was the wording weird and disjointed, but Sadr actually demobilizes the Mahdi Army, going far beyond “freezing” its activities as he did twice in the past year. He limits “resistance” to a “group that shall be authorized to do so by us in writing soon” and that they alone were the ones allowed to carry arms. Everyone else must turn pacifist."
Talisman Gate

The plot thickens.