From The Who In The World Handles Your PR Department:

Remember when the AmericaLast media licked Hitler's and Stalin's boots? If you do, this should come as no surprise.

Washington's other newspaper: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side : Militia Seen as Heroic In Aiding Bomb Victims

In the chaos, Ayad al-Fartoosi thrived.

Against a backdrop of death and panic in Sadr City last Thursday, he strode confidently through streets littered with burning cars and charred bodies. At one moment, he was guiding an ambulance carrying bomb victims through traffic. At another, he was searching cars at a checkpoint. By evening, he had helped to seize a would-be car bomber and to retrieve corpses. By nightfall, he was patrolling the streets of his neighborhood.

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Fartoosi has been a militiaman with the Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Last week, he also served as a relief worker, a policeman, a traffic controller and a guard.

So did thousands of his militia comrades who mobilized to assist victims of the deadliest attack on Iraqis since the invasion, highlighting the power associated with the Mahdi Army's less-publicized roles in Iraqi society.

"We do even more than what the government should do," said Fartoosi, 21, as he recalled the eight grueling hours after a barrage of car bombs, mortars and missiles killed more than 200 people in Baghdad's Shiite heartland.

For U.S. officials, dismantling the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias that have fomented sectarian strife in Iraq is a cornerstone of their calculus to stabilize Iraq and bring U.S. troops home. They view it as a crucial step toward isolating the Sunni Arab insurgency and reconciling the nation.

But the attacks Thursday illustrated the immense difficulties involved in tackling the Mahdi Army, the country's largest and most violent militia, in today 's Iraq. The militiamen were heroes that day, Sadr City residents said in interviews. They did everything that Iraq's fragile unity government did not, or could not, do. In the days since, their actions have boosted Sadr's popularity and emboldened him.

"The Mahdi Army are the people who helped us after the explosion," said Shihab Ahmed, 24, a salesman who was wounded by flying shrapnel. "They saved us."