Word: athists
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...think that it would be possible to hold a referendum on the status of Kirkuk this year. Iraqi Kurds consider the oil-rich city of Kirkuk - which is currently under control of the central government of Baghdad - to be the "Jerusalem" of Kurdistan, stolen from them by a Ba'athist ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. The Kurds have made the return of Kirkuk a central precondition to their participation in a federal Iraq, and will regard any delay as a betrayal. But then again, they are used to betrayal. As the saying goes, the Kurds - a small ethnic group...
Late Monday evening, dozens of conference attendees - a group drawn primarily from the ranks of former military officers, Ba'athist officials, and the Sunni insurgency - gathered for a catered dinner beside the hotel's outdoor pool. Several, including a high-ranking former military officer now overseeing Ba'athist resistance activities in his region, talked openly, if carefully, about strategy, although some asked that their names be withheld. ("We are not afraid," said the former Iraqi army colonel, as waiters delivered the main course of steak and carrots, "but we do not want to give the [Shi'a] militias justification...
...Principals meeting to debate the move. As for the 1 percent number Bremer cites, he didn't ask for that estimate until the date after he issued the order, and once he got it he ignored the two fold context: first that many of those Ba'athists were technocrats of exactly the sort Iraq would soon need if it were to again resume responsibility for its governance, and, second, that every Ba'athist "extirpated" from Iraq, to use Bremer's word, had brothers and sisters and aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom to share his anger...
...Even the remnants of his old regime, which had morphed into the Sunni insurgency, seemed to lose their fervor for Saddam. Some Ba'athist groups kept up the charade that they were fighting to restore the dictator to his palace, but others quickly stopped referring to him at all and instead recast themselves as "the nationalist resistance" or as "mujahedin," or holy warriors. Many threw in their lot with the new ogre on the scene, Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...
...rare admission for a senior Ba'athist, al-Douri said the Saddam regime had blundered in its military strategy at the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion. Rather than allow the Iraqi military to confront the coalition forces in open combat, he believes the leadership "should have husbanded the army's strength and means till the second page had been turned." Still, he claims that Saddam's military bounced back, suggesting that elements of the old army are responsible for 95% of insurgent operations against coalition forces...