Word: abdullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...white walls and guard towers of the hilltop Sheikh Abdullah military barracks are clearly visible from the home of Sheikh Sobhi Toufeili. As one of the founding fathers of Hizballah and its first secretary-general, the gruff 60-year-old cleric knows the barracks well - during the turbulent 1980s, it housed fighters from his organization and a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, as well as several Western hostages, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut who died in captivity. But that was then...
...impoverished Bekaa. Toufeili insists he does not dwell on the past, and spends most of his time studying weighty tracts on Islamic jurisprudence. Yet one cannot help wondering what dark secrets swirl in his memory when he gazes out of his window at the imposing walls of the Sheikh Abdullah barracks down the road...
...into an ethnic struggle. Kirkuk is a major staging ground for Arab insurgents trying to infiltrate Kurdistan, and Kurds say they could do a better job than the Iraqi government of maintaining security there. "If we had control of Kirkuk, we could clean it out in two months," said Abdullah Ali Muhammad, head of Kurdish security forces in Arbil. Other Kurdish officials warn that if the referendum is delayed, Kurds forced out of Kirkuk by the old regime's ethnic-cleansing program would try to return on their own. If that happens and if the Iraqi government hasn't moved...
...Saudi Arabia's increasingly public divergence from U.S. positions is a comparatively new development - until fairly recently, Abdullah appeared willing to support Bush as much as possible. But the message out of the Riyadh summit is that the Saudis, along with the other Arab states, have concluded that Washington's policies are neither wise, effective, or in long-term Arab interests, and they are signaling their intent to take greater control over their own destiny. In his summit speech, Abdullah called the U.S. military involvement in Iraq an "illegitimate foreign occupation," and demanded an end to the "unjust" American...
...tempting to dismiss Abdullah's summit rhetoric as playing to the gallery, but the Washington Post reports that Abdullah has also cancelled his attendance at a White House state dinner planned in his honor next month. It wasn't so long ago that Bush and Abdullah were practically love birds, holding hands as they walked past news cameras during Abdullah's last visit to the U.S. in 2005. For better or worse, they may increasingly be going their separate ways...