Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...measure of how much safer Iraq is these days that some 6,000 people jammed Baghdad's basketball stadium last week to attend a public rally for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Two years ago, at the height of Iraq's sectarian civil war, no one would have dared show up, but this warm-up for the March 7 election was a surprisingly relaxed event. The rings of police around the stadium didn't bother to check for car bombs and gave only one brief pat-down for weapons at the entrance. Inside, al-Maliki, though the head...
...Iraq's reconciliation process clearly still has a long way to go. A number of times during al-Maliki's conciliatory speech, the crowd expressed its enthusiasm in an unabashedly sectarian vocabulary. "We are with you, Ali!" they chanted, referring to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Shi'ites believe was cheated out of the leadership of the community of the faithful more than 1,000 years ago in the original schism with the Sunnis. (See pictures of Iraqis preparing to vote...
...Historians will debate the causes of Iraq's vicious outpouring of sectarian violence after the American invasion in 2003 - was it a reaction to the suppression of religious identity under Saddam Hussein or an extension of the policies of American administrators who found it easiest to deal with Iraqis through a crude sectarian and ethnic prism? Whatever the cause, the sectarian leaders who prevailed in the elections enabled by the U.S. proved incapable of peacefully resolving their differences, which were instead settled in the streets. But as Iraq's fragile new democracy matures, its ever divisive identity politics are becoming...
...have at least some semblance of sectarian diversity. Even the most homogeneous of the big blocs pretend to be more diverse than they really are. For example, the Shi'ite Islamist bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, which critics suspect would like to spin off oil-rich Shi'ite southern Iraq into an autonomous region, includes one Sunni party from Anbar province. When asked, many average Iraqis say sectarian violence was something forced on them by outsiders, a bad dream from which they've now awoken. (See pictures of Iraq's revival...
...identity and the case became the subject of a Bundestag inquiry.) "Gelowicz told the court that 'The Americans have brought the war to my mosque,'" defense attorney Dirk Uden tells TIME. "Gelowicz was obsessed by the idea to fight against the war on terror - he wanted jihad either in Iraq or Chechnya, wherever he could...