Rag-tag force watches over Baghdad militia hotspot

By Adrian Croft BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A rag-tag band of men toting AK-47s at a checkpoint in Baghdad's Sadr City forms part of a plan to strengthen the Iraqi Army's hold over a bastion of anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The men, wearing tan uniforms and baseball caps with "Smirnoff" inexplicably blazoned across them, belong to one of the first groups of a new neighbourhood guard to take to the streets of the sprawling district under a U.S.-funded programme. U.S.-backed neighbourhood patrol units, sometimes called "Sons of Iraq", have spread in mainly Sunni Arab areas of Iraq to beef up security and combat al Qaeda insurgents. The U.S. military says such groups helped cut violence in Iraq to its lowest level in more than four years in May. The neighbourhood guard in Sadr City is the first attempt to set up such a... [read full story]