Word: athists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...declined to implement the U.S. benchmarks for national reconciliation deemed essential for ending the civil war by strengthening the Sunni political stake in Baghdad. The oil law governing distribution of revenues has not been passed, nor have restrictions been significantly eased on former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist organization (the party remains popular among Sunnis) serving in government. Most alarming, perhaps, has been Maliki's departure from the U.S. strategy of putting former Sunni insurgents on the payroll through the "Awakening" militias that drove al-Qaeda out of many communities. (See pictures of post-surge life in Baghdad...
Like other Iraqis, Jabouri wonders who exactly is behind the latest spate of killings. Possibilities include agents of Iran as well as a reconstituting Ba'athist movement. The umbrella insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq remains the most vocal and visible among Iraq's militants, however. Many Iraqi security officials, insurgency experts in Baghdad and Awakening leaders worry that the militants, who melted away during the U.S surge, may have reformed into smaller, yet increasingly lethal, movements in their existing havens of Mosul and Diyala province. Indeed, there is some fear that al-Qaeda may be infiltrating the Awakening...
...people whose hands are soaked in [her] blood," Ahmed's sister Tahani Shahid Ahmed told TIME in a written statement recently. "We just want to know the reason that they killed him," says Mehdi's widow. "He didn't belong to any party, and he's not a Ba'athist. He was only an employee in the bank." Asked how she would confront the soldiers who killed her husband, she says, "I would ask them, Why did you do this to us? Look at our situation. We barely have enough space to sleep...
...athist backing will have the opposite effect on his fellow Shi'ites, especially for the Islamist coalition that is the largest block in the Iraqi parliament, and on Kurdish parties that comprise the second-largest block. Shi'ites and Kurds bore the brunt of Saddam's repression and regard the Ba'ath leadership as mass murderers. Many members of Allawi's own secular coalition regard the Ba'ath as anathema...
...coalition's most likely candidate is Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a French-trained economist and political chameleon. Having been, at various points in his career, a communist, a Ba'athist and a secular liberal democrat, he has switched directions so many times it's hard to know which way he's going. These days, Abdul-Mahdi represents the Shi'ite-fundamentalist Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), which, like Maliki's Dawa Party, is beholden to Tehran. Twice in the past two years, Abdul-Mahdi has told journalists he was on the verge of quitting the SIIC to form his own party...