A PROFILE OF SADR'S "ARMY"

They're a ragtag team of about 1,000 or so young, impoverished men who sometimes shoot one another by accident or stick machine guns out windows and spray the area without looking.

Yet they've also set up clever ambushes, demonstrated surprising resilience and executed defensive maneuvers that have impressed the U.S. military.

After a week of butting heads with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, U.S. military authorities tasked with capturing or killing the Shiite cleric call his militia a mix of sophistication and amateur hour...

The vast majority of al-Sadr's militiamen are young and unemployed and are inspired by al-Sadr's anti-American rhetoric and calls to end the occupation of Iraq.

"They're mostly thugs," said Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the newly created task force in Najaf. "A lot are young kids in it just for the thrill."

Soldiers who have faced the militia in street battles say members frequently lose control of their weapons or fail to aim carefully.

"We call it spray and pray," said Capt. Sean Stinchon, 29, of the 1-14 Infantry. "They don't even use the scopes."...

Stinchon and other officers, awaiting the resolution of negotiations over the U.S. standoff with al-Sadr, got a firsthand look at the questionable marksmanship of the cleric's militia last week when their six-vehicle convoy was forced by rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire to cross a bridge over the Euphrates River and race down a busy commercial street in Kufa.

As the U.S. forces sped the wrong way down a street at 50 mph, about 50 al-Sadr followers fired machine guns and AK-47s. But none of the soldiers was hit.

"We should have been dead," Heyward said. Because the attackers positioned themselves across the street from each other, some appear to have shot one another as well as hitting innocent bystanders, according to U.S. soldiers...

...(T)hey continue to make rookie mistakes.

Three al-Sadr followers were captured near a military checkpoint Friday.

Inside the shirt pocket of one man was a document claiming he was a French journalist. But he also was carrying an invoice for weapons for the Mahdi Army, diagrams for making homemade bombs and a picture of al-Sadr in his wallet.

Disguised as a French journalist? Natch.