THANKS, MOOKIE:

Sadr City starts to turn around, posing new challenges: New challenges as U.S. gears up to enforce security plan (Damien Cave, February 8, 2007, NY Times)

Just past the main guarded checkpoint into Sadr City, children kicked soccer balls on fields with new green nets where mounds of trash covered the ground last summer. A few blocks away, city workers planted palm trees in the median while men gathered at a café nearby to chatter and laugh.

Sadr City, once infamous as a fetid slum and symbol of Shiite repression, is recovering with the help of $41 million in reconstruction funds from the Shiite- led Iraqi government, all of it spent since May, according to Iraqi officials, and millions more in American assistance.

But as Shiite areas like Sadr City begin to thrive as self-enclosed fiefdoms, middle-class Sunni enclaves are withering into abandoned ghettoes, starved of government services.

Many residents credit the Mahdi army and its powerful political leader, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, for keeping the area safe enough to allow rebuilding.