Word: crackdowns
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Easy Targets IRAQ Defying the continuing U.S. military crackdown on insurgents within Iraq's Sunni triangle, suicide bombers struck simultaneously at two Iraqi police stations in towns north of Baghdad Saturday, killing at least 18 and injuring dozens more. In a separate attack, a civilian cargo plane made an emergency landing at Baghdad International Airport after apparently being struck by a surface-to-air missile, the first plane to be hit since major combat operations ended in May. The weekend's assaults came a day after guerrillas co-ordinated a series of attacks in Baghdad using rockets mounted on donkey...
...establishing Islamist regimes. But pursuing that goal via terrorist bombings in those countries carries the inherent risk of turning potentially sympathetic public opinion against the extremists, as it did in Egypt during the 1990s when terror attacks on tourists and civilians prompted many Egyptians to support a ferocious government crackdown. The latest attacks in Turkey, like those in Riyadh, may have been directed at targets somehow associated with foreigners, but most of the victims have been Muslim passersby...
...died in Turkey's bitter war against Kurdish separatists that ended about four years ago. That war on terror saw human rights abuses that were cited by the European Union as reasons to delay Turkey's membership, and the al-Qaeda aligned insurgents may want to provoke a widespread crackdown and foment hostility between secular military authorities and a civilian political leadership with Islamist roots, in the hope that this could halt Turkey's democratic reform process and delay its accession to the EU. Turkey may have managed to avoid domestic political discord by staying out of the Iraq...
...says. Khumalo's ordeal is just one skirmish in President Robert Mugabe's long, bloody war on dissent. Over the past six weeks, Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party (ZANU-PF) has closed the country's only independent daily newspaper and stepped up its violent crackdown on political opponents and dissidents. The next target: nongovernmental organizations. Mugabe's parliament has drafted laws requiring aid groups to register with the government and allowing it to suspend their leadership. "They want to do to civil society exactly what they've done to the media," says John Makumbe...
...Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), an independent economic think tank. "The concern is that when the government eventually stops pumping in money, whenever that is, the economy will collapse." Meanwhile, the country's economic success has diverted attention from Thaksin's more controversial policies, including this year's deadly crackdown on drug dealers. "This country is going backward, not forward," says a Thai human-rights worker in Bangkok. "The government is giving people money with one hand while taking their liberties away with the other...