Word: baathist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jasim is a killer. In the past six months he claims to have helped assassinate 10 former members of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime, most of them officials in the disbanded mukhabarat, Iraq's ruthless intelligence service. A construction worker who declines to give his full name for fear of retribution, Jasim, 31, has scores to settle. In 1999, after he participated in the murder of three Baathist officials, the mukhabarat threw him into prison, where he says he was whipped and beaten and tortured with electric shocks to his penis. Released in a general amnesty Saddam granted just before...
...officials say they are working to establish a court system that can prosecute the worst offenders from Saddam's regime. According to the plan, the tribunals will first try the 45 key Baathist leaders in custody, then move on to rank-and-file regime loyalists accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it could take years for such courts to bring former Baathist officials to justice. At a recent conference, Iraqi human-rights groups lashed out at a director of the reconciliation effort in Cambodia, where the process of trying members of Pol Pot's regime...
...more narrow and self-serving level, Bin Laden also has an interest in demonstrating his continued relevance at a time when much of the Muslim world's anti-American enthusiasms are inspired by an Iraqi insurgency led, on the ground, by mid-level Baathist security force officers supported by local Islamist elements. Bin Laden terrorist ego may be feeling the pressure to show that he and his movement, not the apostate Saddam and his secular nationalist Baathists, are the nemesis of the Americans...
...Baghdad station chief from reports compiled by some 270 operatives on the ground, makes nonsense of the administration's sunny attempts to measure progress by schools rebuilt and electricity supplies, and also of its tendency to characterize the escalating insurgency as the last hurrah of Baathist "dead-enders," al-Qaeda carpetbaggers and other assorted losers...
...told TIME that Hizballah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militia, is becoming more active in Iraq. Pentagon officials leaked word that captured insurgents had claimed that Iraqi General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a Saddam intimate who is No. 6 on the U.S. most-wanted list, was the main commander of Baathist hit squads. Some U.S. officials told reporters Saddam himself could be directing the attacks--though they had no hard evidence. That speculation was startling for an Administration that has long insisted, as Bush put it in July, that Saddam was "no longer a threat to the U.S., because we removed...