Ellen Knickmeyer (Extracted from "Shiite urges US to give Iraqis leeway in rebel fight", Washington Post -- 27 November 2005)

"The leader [Abdul Aziz Hakim] of Iraq's most powerful political party [the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution] has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, saying his country will only be able to defeat the insurgency when the United States lets Iraqis get tough."

[Ed: The Sunnis in Baghdad have been engaged in a mini-civil war against Shias ever since about February 2004. So far, several thousand Shias have been killed by suicide bombers as they queued for recruitment into the police and security forces. More recently, however, we have had reports of Sunnis being starved and tortured in make-shift prisons run by the Interior Minister of the Iraq transitional government. Whether the above plea is designed to deflect world attention from the tortures or whether they want to escalate the civil war is questionable at the moment -- but it looks like the latter to me.]