Word: iraqis
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MUNTAZER AL-ZAIDI, the Iraqi man who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush during a press conference last year, after being released from prison on Sept...
...Syria is not about to hand over former Baathists for prosecution, either. Syrian officials point out that their country protected many members of the current Iraqi government when they were exiled by Saddam, including Maliki himself, who spent 20 years in Damascus. "There are [now] 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria," Fayssal Mekdad, Syria's Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs tells TIME. "When they came here we didn't ask them what party they belonged to. We just opened our doors...
...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 out to the Iraqi government in 2007, holding a conference to reevaluate the mistakes of the Saddam regime, reject their old Baathist ideology, and adopt more democratic policies. (See pictures of Saddam Hussein...
...TIME earlier this month, the unofficial spokesman for the group, Nizar Samra'y, said it is more concerned about the growing Iranian influence on Iraq's government than in forcing U.S. troops out of the country. "We need to have a strong state in Iraq that works [toward] an Iraqi agenda not an Iranian one," he says. "We know America has an interest to return Iraq as a strong country and to stabilize the region. If America withdraws from Iraq now it will have a criminal responsibility." In order to stabilize the country, however, he said the U.S. needs...
...been quietly pushing the Iraqi government to begin a process of national reconciliation to reduce the risk of sectarian violence as the U.S. withdraws its forces. But Maliki's decision to blame Younis for the August bombings and demand Syria extradite him is a sign that he has no interest in negotiating with former Baathists, says Fadil al Roubai, an Iraqi political analyst in Syria. "It's a political accusation to keep Syria from pushing Iraq to engage this wing in the political process," he says. (See pictures of U.S. troops' 6 years in Iraq...