Word: baathists
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...regimes were busy attacking not only each other but the U.S. as well. The Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the stridently abrasive spiritual leader of Iran's revolution, called for international help in opposing "Zionist Iraq and the U.S." At the same time, the official newspaper of Iraq's Baathist ruling party blamed Iran's unruly actions on "the U.S., international Zionism, the Sadat regime and all the signatories to the Camp David accords...
...vulnerable to such pressure. In the first place, its political and military leadership is largely Sunni Muslim, while over half of Iraq's 12.8 million people are Shi'ite Muslims who share a sense of community with their religious brethren in Iran. Moreover, the Baghdad regime is Baathist, and the Baath Party, both in Iraq and Syria, favors secularism, social reconstruction and economic development. To make matters worse, Iran has reportedly been inciting the Kurds in northern Iraq to rebel against Baghdad. For their part, the Iranians suspect that the current border troubles are being aggravated by Iranian...
Syria and Iraq have been enemies for years, ruled by feuding wings of the Baathist Party. So they surprised just about everybody in the Middle East when they announced that they were seriously thinking of merging into one unified state...
Considering the fact that the rival wings of the Baathist Party that rules both countries have been at loggerheads for years, and that agents of the two governments have lately been unusually busy trying to blow each other up (there have been three assassination attempts against the Syrian Foreign Minister by Iraqis and shootouts in embassies around the world), the giddy rhetoric of unity was greeted with some bemusement by foreign diplomats. Still, the fact that these erstwhile enemies, concerned not only about Camp David but also the instability in Iran, were even talking about merging was genuinely remarkable...
...observers of the Arab world, it was no great surprise that Iraqi diplomatic missions figured so centrally in the bloody raids. Iraq's fanatic Baathist government rejects any negotiations whatsoever with Israel. Baghdad was annoyed when the P.L.O. in May decided to suspend its Lebanon-based military operations against Israel.* In response, the Iraqis shut down P.L.O. weapons factories in the country and reportedly intercepted shipments of arms and medicines from China intended for Arafat's troops...