Word: baathists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last few years, however, Syria has started to clamp down on insurgents trying to infiltrate Iraq, and in August a U.S. military delegation visited Damascus to discuss increased cooperation on border security. Even more promising has been the change of attitude of many former Baathists in Syria, who are broadly split into two factions: a hard-line group led by a former vice president in Saddam's government, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and a more moderate but less powerful group led by Muhammad Younis, a former adviser to Saddam's executive council. Younis's group began reaching...
Ironically, some of the best friends to Christians in the Middle East have been at odds with America and the West. The secular societies that formed in the 1950s and '60s in opposition to Israel - especially the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and Egypt under Nasser - were pretty good protectors of religious pluralism. About 5% or 6% of Iraq's population in the 1970s were Christian, and some of Saddam Hussein's most prominent officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, were Christians. But since the American invasion of Iraq, Christians have fled in droves, and constitute less than...
Iraq?s insurgency includes several disparate groups: religious zealots like the Takfiris (followers of an extremist form of Sunni Islam) and al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and remnants of Saddam?s former secular Baathist regime on the other. The two sides were united by their common enemies: U.S. troops and the Iraqis who worked with the ?occupiers,? like al-Maliki, but little else. (See a who's who of combatants in Iraq...
...Iraqis complained of names missing from polling lists. Preliminary results, to be released on Feb. 5, are expected to garner some controversy, however. In one Shi'ite province, a candidate who is unofficially leading the polls has been accused of serving as a top official in Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. In other regions, allegations of voter fraud have been made...
...Allawi, a Shi'ite and former Baathist who was tapped by the U.S. occupation authority to be Iraq's first Prime Minister after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, has always billed himself as stridently secular. But when Iraqis were given the right to choose their leaders at the polls, Allawi lost out to the parties based on Shi'ite and Sunni identity. Since then, he and his party have been working to promote a more secular approach to Iraqi governance, and the preliminary returns released on Thursday for Iraq's provincial elections show they are making gains - at least relative...