And of course the media is ignoring what is going on in that country

other than by those incapable of rational thinking.

This is largely a sectarian civil war and closely related to what's going on in Syria. Many of those Al Qaeda types in Syria got their hands-on training in Iraq a few years ago.

It looks like Assad-Maliki-Iran v. Syria rebel-Iraq rebels-Saudi Arabia-Qatar-Turkey

The usage of that term is dehumanizing.

"a place that serves as the center of a group, as of militants or of persons holding a controversial viewpoint..."

I think that that is to somehow frame this (unintentionally or not) as something other than an attack on a residential neighborhood. "Neighborhood" is what people in the US have, but somehow Iraqis have "strongholds."

Esp. along sectarian lines.

The neighborhoods are also nicely segregated, thanks to gun-point "ethnic" cleansing. This allows neighborhoods to function as points of sectarian organization, so that a Sunni neighborhood is much more likely to be a safe place for Sunnis to manufacture car bombs than, say, in Sadr City. And Sadr City would be a far more likely place to find a militant Shi'ite organization that goes all 'splody on Sunni mosque attendees than, say, Tikrit.

Sadr City was a large Shi'ite slum.

During the war it was Sadr's base of operations for his part in the sectarian war. Sunnis were rare there before; then checkpoints were set up and all Sunnis purged, making it a stronghold of support for Sadr and a stronghold--in the strictest military sense, with razor wire "protecting" it from retaliatory strikes--for Shi'ite Muslims. In some sense it was a ghetto, but a militarized one.

The term "stronghold," like "ghetto," can be derogatory. It is not dehumanizing. In 2005-11 "stronghold" wasn't even derogatory, just factual. And it mostly likely remains an apt description to the present. (Now it's more likely that Sunnis will be in ghettoes, all things considered.)

There was a bombing that killed Sunnis the other day. It's constant back and forth violence - a good reminder of why we should do as much as we can to extricate our selves from that part of the world (and not get involved in places like Syria).

Sounds stupid doesnt it. And makes as much sense. They're both Muslims worshipping the same God. Idiots.