The 2004 Iraq spring fighting represented a significant turning point in the Iraq War, marking the entrance into the conflict of militias and religiously based militant groups, including both Shia and Sunni factions. The first months of 2004 had been characterized by a relative lull in violence, during which guerrilla attacks lessened in intensity while insurgent forces reorganized, studied multinational forces' tactics, and planned a renewed offensive. The spring fighting emerged from two primary causes: first, the rise of conservative Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army, which had been created in June 2003. Al-Sadr rejected the US-led occupation of Iraq and gained considerable influence in the southern part of the country as well as in Sadr City, a section of Baghdad that had been renamed in honor of al-Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The second cause of the spring fighting was identified as a highly publicized incident, though the article's text is incomplete regarding its specific details. These developments fundamentally altered the nature of the conflict, as organized militia forces with explicit religious and political agendas began to play a dominant role in the fighting alongside other insurgent groups.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
~25 Comanche killed; 1 US killed
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