Word: ite
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...Iraqi soldiers and American GIs on the other broke out. Though the encounter was minimized by top U.S. military officials, the battle appears to have been a more serious outbreak of sectarian violence, between well-organized units of the insurgency and what military sources suspect was a Shi'ite death squad linked to the U.S.-backed Iraqi government...
...question is exactly what triggered this battle and who fought it. Sunni community leaders claim that local residents grabbed whatever weapons they had to defend their homes from a sectarian attack by Shi'ite militias in government uniforms. They say night guards, akin to an armed neighborhood watch, fired back at roaming gunmen strafing them as they stood watch. However, American officers say the men they ended up fighting weren't mere homeowners. They used the fire and movement techniques of trained soldiers. "These guys who stood and fought were not just neighborhood types," says Markos, a steely artillery officer...
...associated with his own sect, and (in the case of the Kurds) hostile to a federalism that would allow the creation of de facto-independent regions. One early test will come over the next month as Maliki cobbles together a cabinet - Jaafari had favored putting members of the Shi'ite alliance in charge of the defense and security portfolios that Washington wants to see controlled by U.S.-friendly secular leaders...
...security forces. That's an option that has critics worried, because if they keep their shape and leadership, then incorporating them simply gives militias official license to operate, in much the same the way that critics have charged that the Interior Ministry commandoes double as a Shi'ite militia...
...Maliki, whose political base includes the two major Shi'ite militias, may be tempted to point to the Kurdish example, where the "peshmerga" forces loyal to the region's two main political parties have been rebranded as units of the new security forces. The Kurdish leaders aren't about to accept the breakup and dispersal of the peshmerga into a wider army on a non-sectarian basis, so Maliki may be able to get away with his position, insisting that what's good for the Kurds is good for everyone else...