Word: baathist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...American soldiers should be standing guard duty at a children's hospital (where three G.I.s were killed in a grenade attack in July). That can be done by others and would free up the U.S. military to do what it does best: hunt down the remnants of the Baathist regime and confront their foreign terrorist allies...
...Though the damage being wrought by the insurgents is plain to see, their identity is not always clear. Bremer describes the insurgents as "Baathist bitter-enders," but other U.S. officials say the attacks come from a number of quite distinct forces. Remnants of the regime's security and intelligence services certainly play a major part, and Bremer's decision to summarily dissolve the Iraqi army and the Interior Ministry may have swelled the ranks of those willing to fight on. Secret documents reportedly issued by Saddam's security services shortly before the war instructed operatives to join up with Islamic...
...months now, U.S. officials have banked on the capture of Saddam Hussein to quell the attacks against American soldiers. But as Mohammed's story illustrates, resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq goes beyond loyal remnants of the old regime. The non-Baathist components of the opposition include nationalists, tribalists and ordinary citizens offended by the armed presence of foreigners and especially by the occupiers' perceived power abuses. Other resisters include non-Iraqi Arabs, possibly jihadis who have traveled to Iraq to take on the U.S., as well as fundamentalist Shi'ites...
...response of Iraqi insurgents to the deaths of Uday and Qusay has been to escalate their attacks on U.S. forces. But the question of whether these are a Baathist swan song or part of an expanding guerrilla war will only be answered in the months ahead, particularly if Saddam is taken out of the equation in short order. U.S. analysts certainly believe that remnants of Saddam's regime are playing a central role in the resistance, but it's not clear whether they're dependent on the same central authority that held them together before the regime was toppled. There...
...attacks have occurred in the "Sunni triangle" stretching north from Baghdad, however, signifies that the insurgency has a distinct social base. Sunni Arabs constitute 15 percent of Iraq's population, but they have dominated its politics and economy for most of the past century. Many of them were not Baathists, but as Iraq expert Professor Juan Cole, of the University of Michigan, notes, the Sunnis enjoyed a privileged status under Baathist rule equivalent to that of white South Africans under apartheid - the state always rewarded them with a disproportionate allocation of resources and opportunities. The onset of democracy in Iraq...