He won't be tater much longer. He'll be a flat old chip!!!
...An official in the cleric's office, Haidar al-Tourfi, said he received a text message from al-Sadr saying: "Either martyrdom or victory."
| Go for martyrdom. That, and $150 will get you a headstone... |
On Wednesday, al-Sadr sent a letter to the Iraqi National Conference saying he agreed to their peace demands and that his fighters would lay down their arms and leave the shrine. Al-Sadr is known for flip-flopping on various peace deals with the fledgling Iraqi government.
| ... which he immediately did... |
By Thursday, Iraqi officials were getting fed up with the firebrand cleric and his antics and vowed that an attack could be imminent within hours. Iraqi Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said that to prevent such an attack, al-Sadr must immediately disarm his Mahdi Army militia and hand over its weapons to the authorities. He also must sign a statement saying he will refrain from future violence and release all civilians and Iraqi security forces his militants have kidnapped. In addition, al-Sadr must hold a news conference to announce he is disbanding the Mahdi Army. "The military action has become imminent," Dawoud told reporters. "If these conditions are not met, then the military solution will prevail."
| At which point more cannon fodder will be burned, while Tater hides in the holiest mosque he can find and threatens to destroy it... |
After hearing Dawoud's threat, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr in Baghdad, called for talks to quickly "stop the bloodbaths in the holy city of Najaf."
"What we want is for the parties to sit down and cooperate. To ask a side, or the Sadrist movement, to disarm, I think is not logical and not right.
| To ask the government to disarm is pretty stoopid... |
"They should rather sit around a negotiating table and determine what's right and wrong," he told Al-Arabiya television. The statement was made before al-Sheibani said al-Sadr rejected the Iraqi conditions... |