[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] A power struggle within Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority has intensified as attempts to form a new government flounder, threatening to turn violent and ruin US-led efforts to defeat ISIS.For the first time since the US withdrawal at the end of 2011, Shiite factions came close to taking arms against each another last month, when followers of powerful holy man Moqtada
Tateral-Sadr
... the Iranian catspaw holy man who was 22 years old in 2003 and was nearing 40 in 2010. He spends most of his time in Iran, safely out of the line of fire, where he's learning to be an ayatollah...
stormed the parliament in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Rival Shiite turbans took up positions nearby, raising the specter of intra-Shiite fighting similar to events in the southern city of Basra in 2008, in which hundreds of people were killed.
Trucks carrying those militiamen, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, patrolled the capital in clear view of the security forces, video published on the website of Iranian-backed group Saraya al-Khorasani showed.
The crisis presents the biggest political challenge yet to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, a moderate Shiite Islamist who took office in 2014 promising to defeat ISIS, mend rifts with the minority Sunnis and Kurds, and root out corruption eating away at state income which has already been eroded by a slump in oil prices.