In Sadr City, things are on a knife's edge, both The New York Times and the Washington Post report, while in Basra, things are going pretty well.

Over there
Stephen Farrell and Ammar Karim of the Times report that things are going well in Basra following the drive on the city at the end of March. And who says the media don't report good news? "In a rare success, forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki have largely quieted the city, to the initial surprise and growing delight of many inhabitants who only a month ago shuddered under deadly clashes between Iraqi troops and Shiite militias." But the gains are -- what's the word? -- "fragile," and doubts exist that Iraq can maintain the large troop presence in Basra needed to keep it quiet. The Iraqis have 33,000 security forces there, and Basra is coming back to life. (It was once a rockin' port city, the Venice of the Middle East, with a liberal reputation.) But some Iraqis say it would take only one day for Basra to slip into lawlessness again if the Army departed. Still, it's a welcome bit of news that things seem to be going better -- for the moment.

Well, so much for that truce in Sadr Ci...

A sudden ceasefire agreement that was reached - on Saturday - between the Maliki government and the Sadrist Current, and was immediately followed by “the Lion’s Roar,” the codename of a new government campaign to take over Mosul.

Regarding the Sadr-Maliki truce, Kull al-‘Iraq quoted Salah al-‘Ubaidi, who affirmed, on behalf of the Sadrist leadership, that “a 14-point agreement” was reached to end the fighting in Sadr City and southern Iraq between the Mahdi Army and the US and Iraqi government forces.

The clashes, which started with a government campaign in Basra against the Mahdi Army, have spread to cover much of southern Iraq. And in Baghdad’s Sadr City, a long-drawn confrontation has been taking place for weeks, with hundreds of Iraqi casualties and a virtual siege of the pro-Sadr Shi’a district. Throughout the conflict, Maliki was asserting that the military campaigns will not stop until militias such as the Mahdi Army have been disarmed. Sadrists, on the other...

While the fighting in Sadr City that has raged for weeks between US-Iraqi forces and suspected elements of the Mahdi Army militia has not showed any signs of abating, rumors continue to circulate in Iraqi media of possible deals between the Iraqi government and the Mahdi Army leadership to end the standoff.

Today, an Iraqi news outlet writes in Arabic that it has conducted an exclusive interview with "sources close to the Sadrist Current" who said that "the parties responsible...