Word: arabism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Almost 80% of Iraqis are Arab, while some 15-20% are Kurds - a distinct ethnic group with its own language, history and culture, concentrated in northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, northern Iran and southern Georgia. Kurds have struggled for their rights as a cultural minority in all of those societies, often suffering vicious repression, but have enjoyed de facto independence in northern Iraq under U.S. protection since the 1991 Gulf War. Although they participate in Iraqi national politics and one of their key leaders, Jalal Talabani, is currently Iraq's president, the vast majority of Iraqi Kurds have signaled...
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was ruled by a mostly secular Sunni Arab elite, which viciously suppressed the Shiite Arab majority and the Kurdish minority. But the toppling of Saddam's regime has altered the power balance between those groups, who are waging an increasingly bitter power struggle...
...traditions have different approaches to religious law and practice, and different notions of religious hierarchy, but both observe the same fundamental tenets of Islam. Although Shiism is the overwhelmingly dominant form of Islam among the Persians of Iran, in most of the Arab world Shiites are an impoverished and disenfranchised underclass. And the more extremist Sunni "Salafist" tradition that predominates in Saudi Arabia, as well as among the jihadists of al-Qaeda, denigrates Shiites as apostates. Within both Shiism and the Sunni tradition, however, there are a variety of different approaches to theological, legal and political questions, and they have...
...contemporary conflict between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq is based not only on a schism that happened almost 14 centuries ago, but on the politics of the Saddam Hussein era. The Sunni Arabs, some 15-20% of the population, provided the bulk of the governing class under Saddam, while the Shiites, who comprise upward of 60% of the population, were denied political rights and their religious freedoms were curtailed. The contemporary politics of the divide also has a regional dimension: The main Shiite religious political parties that have dominated both of Iraq's democratic elections have close ties to Iran...
...Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made her way around the Middle East this week trying in vain to convince Arab governments to cut all funding to a Hamas-led government, the U.S. and Israel both found themselves struggling to find a workable response to an unanticipated reality. The only way the U.S.-Israeli effort to isolate a Hamas-led Palestinian government will succeed, right now, is if Hamas were to launch new terror strikes against Israel. And that's precisely the reason why Palestinian observers and Israeli security analysts expect the radical Islamist movement to maintain and extend the cease...