The Christian Science Monitor reports in depth about efforts by SIIC and the Hakims to carve out a Shia state in the south of Iraq:

The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), one of the most powerful Shiite parties, is leading the charge to form an autonomous "South of Baghdad Region." ... In recent weeks, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of SIIC leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, has been leading a passionate grassroots campaign to rally support for the project.

"A fundamental cornerstone of the new Iraq is the creation of regions all over Iraq, especially the South of Baghdad Region," said the younger Mr. Hakim during a rally in Najaf on July 19 commemorating the killing of his uncle Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim in August 2003 in the same city.

"I call upon you to be totally prepared from now to form the South of Baghdad Region at the end of the period prescribed by parliament," he said.

On July 21, he repeated the plea at another rally in Baghdad.

That would be April 2008, when regions can formally be created.

Partition is increasingly being advocated by Washington lawmakers and think tanks as the only way to bring peace to Iraq. "There is a massive operation underway to pave the way for the [south of Baghdad] region, but it's being done quietly," says Sheikh Jalaleddin al-Saghir, a senior parliamentarian and Hakim partisan who favors the SIIC plan.

It's not like SIIC controls things, though. Earlier this week, the Post reported a three-way battle for control of Basra, the oil and port city in the south that is key to everything in Iraq.

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said. ...

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

It's clear that none of the Shia players are paying attention to the crumbling Maliki. SIIC is doing its own thing, and Sadr's forces and Fadhila are battling SIIC and each other for power across the south. Tribal chieftains in the south are weighing in, too.