Drilling and dumping the enemy

Telegraph/Washington Times:

Less than six months after an American air strike ended Abu Musab Zarqawi's campaign of Sunni terrorism, an equally brutal fanatic has emerged on the Shi'ite side of the religious divide.
Abu Deraa's trademark method of killing is a drill through the skull rather than a sword to the neck, but his work rate is just as prolific as the former al Qaeda in Iraq leader's and shows the same diabolical artistry.
In the past year, he and his followers are thought to have killed thousands of Sunnis, their victims' bodies symbolically dumped in road craters left by al Qaeda car bombs.
Stopping monsters such as Abu Deraa -- whose nom de guerre means "the shield" -- is a top U.S. priority as it tries to halt sectarian violence, which regularly claims 100 lives a day.
But the Shi'ite-dominated government has shown a marked reluctance to sanction the kind of large-scale operation necessary to arrest him in his stronghold of Sadr City, a vast Shi'ite slum in eastern Baghdad.
Taking action against him could cost it valuable support among other Shi'ite militias who, despite official disdain for Abu Deraa's bloodthirstiness, value the fear that such a loose cannon inspires in their enemies.
"We are proud of leaders like Abu Deraa," said Hassan Allami, 25, a fighter with the Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi's Army, which Abu Deraa quit earlier this year to form his own faction. "His drills destroy the crazy minds of the Sunnis."
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Sheik al-Sadr may be a thug himself, coalition officials say, but at least he represented a single, identifiable authority. If dozens of freelance players emerge alongside him, negotiation becomes impossible.
"The whole thing is becoming increasingly localized, with people like Sadr being outflanked by extremists whom he can't control," said Eric Herring, the British author of "Iraq in Fragments," a study released last year that charts Iraq's breakup into innumerable competing factions. "It's possible that we may eventually remember Sadr as a moderate."
The emergence of local warlords with their own agendas is not confined to the sectarian front lines of Baghdad. In the city of Amara, in Shi'ite-dominated southern Iraq, local Sadrists are in a violent power struggle with the Badr Brigade, a rival Shi'ite militia backed by Iran.
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While some may see a rough justice in drilling the brains of Sunni terrorist and dumping their bodies in a ditch created by one of their human bomb attacks, the slide into war lordism has to be reversed if the Iraqi government is to become the legitimate power it intends. Maleki's failure to seize the opportunity that his government has been given is one reason for this slide and his embrace of Sadr shows his lack of seriousness in dealing with this problem.