Word: ashraf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tuesday, Baghdad obliged. Iraqi security forces wrenched control of the MEK base at Camp Ashraf from its leaders after they denied an Iraqi request to establish a police station inside the camp. Clashes ensued that, according to the MEK, left six residents dead and some 400 wounded. (The casualties have not been independently verified.) Baghdad denies using lethal force. A video distributed by the MEK shows baton-wielding security forces beating unarmed protesters and using water cannons on a crowd, as well as several bloodied individuals. (Read a story about a visit to Camp Ashraf in April...
...Wednesday, according to Shahriar Kia, an MEK spokesman contacted by phone. Iraqi security forces remain in the camp and "have surrounded all the places," he told TIME. Most of the camp's 3,400 residents have begun an open-ended hunger strike, Kia added, until Iraqi troops withdraw from Ashraf, U.S. troops assume control and the perpetrators of the attacks are tried and punished "in an international tribunal on the charges of crimes against humanity." Those are big things to ask for and unlikely to happen anytime soon, especially given that the U.S. military is looking to untangle itself from...
Baghdad took over responsibility for Camp Ashraf, located some 40 miles north of the capital, from the U.S. military earlier this year as part of a wide-ranging bilateral security pact. Since then, Iraqi officials have ratcheted up the pressure, repeatedly warning that they would close the camp on the grounds that its residents were "terrorists" and "illegal aliens...
...ruling was based on an earlier British court decision that ordered the terrorist designation be lifted because of a lack of evidence that the MEK had been involved in terrorist activity since it renounced violence in 2001. (In Iraq, the U.S. Army disarmed MEK's Ashraf compound in the country's east in 2003, calling it a security threat. The Iraqi government has indicated it will close the camp completely...
...Founded as a Muslim nation carved from British-ruled India in 1947, Pakistan has long struggled to unite a population divided by language, culture and ethnicity. It is quite true that Pakistan may never have resolved what Sabahat Ashraf, a Pakistani blogger now living in California, calls its "existential dilemma: Are we an Islamic state, or are we a state of Muslims?" but Islam has always been a common denominator. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the nation rallied under the banner of jihad. Today any attack on Islam, even the perception of one, is akin to an assault...