Word: baathist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...know that former Baathists have been at the heart of the Sunni insurgency. In Anbar province, for example, a key financier and coordinator of the insurgency has been Rashid Taan Kazim-one of the few cards in the deck representing Saddam's leadership circle we weren't able to capture. We are negotiating in Jordan with Baathist representatives of the Sunni insurgency; we're trying to split them off from the al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia terrorists, and we may succeed if a re-Baathification program is put in place. It is less well known that Sadr's Shi'ite militia...
...worried as Turkey is about the Kurds becoming independent. They want a united Iraq, a democratic Iraq in which the Shi'ites' majority makes itself felt. They obviously want their preferred Shi'ite leaders, such as Maliki and Hakim, to be in power, rather than, for example, a former Baathist Shi'ite such as Iyad Allawi [the former prime minister installed by the U.S.], or Moqtada Sadr, who is viewed by Iran as a loose cannon who they would prefer to see marginalized. Tehran is even willing to see the Sunnis given more power in Iraq in order to help...
Nowhere has the trial brought more misery than in Dujail, a town of 84,000, most of them Shi'ites, in the middle of the Sunni triangle. Since the start of Saddam's trial, Dujail has been infiltrated by ex-Baathist hit squads. Residents believe they have been ordered by Saddam's former henchmen to take out the families of witnesses. A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a mere 45-minute drive north of Dujail, have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the Green Zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist...
...claims that U.S. and Iraqi forces have followed up with a damaging crackdown on Qaeda cells around Baghdad - has coincided with Maliki's moves towards reconciliation with the Sunnis, including the release of some 2,500 prisoners suspected of aiding the insurgents and the naming of a former Baathist general as defense minister. Not surprisingly, that has prompted speculation that some in the insurgency may be discreetly cooperating in eliminating the Qaeda element; the two groups have little in common politically beyond a common hostility to the U.S., and tensions between them have long been evident...
...consider themselves in outright conflict with one another. "War might be tomorrow or one year from now; it all depends on the sparks made by those seeking to inflame it," says Abu Mohammed, a former top-ranking officer in Saddam Hussein's army and now a key Baathist insurgent strategist. Another Baathist insurgent downplays the pervasiveness of sectarian hatred: "It's true there are death squads killing Shi'ite and killing Sunni, and while they're Iraqi, they're really the instruments of foreign interests"--referring to al-Qaeda and Iran. His Shi'ite counterparts in al-Sadr's militia...