Word: ite
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Zalmay Khalilzad says as he adjusts his bulletproof vest and settles into the back seat of his armored SUV. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq has just emerged from a meeting at the sprawling riverside home of Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the coalition of Shi'ite parties that controls Iraq's incoming parliament. It didn't go well. For more than an hour, Khalilzad tried to persuade al-Hakim to help revive the Iraqi political process, stalled in part because the Shi'ites refuse to bend to demands by secular, Kurdish and Sunni parties that Prime Minister Ibrahim...
That's a familiar situation for Khalilzad these days. As Iraq's political parties squabble over the nature and composition of a new government, sectarian violence has pushed the country closer than ever to full-bore civil war. U.S. commanders believe that Sunni-Shi'ite violence is surpassing jihadi terrorism as the biggest threat to the country's long-term stability. And yet the prospect of a deeper, more vicious war has so far failed to prod the country's leaders into setting aside their rivalries and forming a broadly representative government, which may be the U.S.'s best hope...
...Khalilzad says the main political hurdle at the moment is the deep division over who should be Iraq's next prime minister. The Shi'ite alliance that won the largest block of seats in the Dec 15 general election has nominated Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who is prime minister of the interim government. But Kurdish, Sunni and secular parties have in recent days mounted a strong challenge, demanding that Jaafari's nomination be withdrawn. They blame Jaafari for the interim government's many failings, including its failure to act quickly and decisively to prevent the sectarian conflagration that followed the Samarra...
...ites don't have a majority in the parliament, and in recent days, fissures have appeared in the Shi'ite alliance. But Jaafari is backed by the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, an unpredictable political maverick with an armed militia, known as the Mahdi Army, that is widely blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence...
...unclear how Shi'ite and Sunni parties will respond to the ambassador's invitation, but the Kurds - Washington's oldest allies in Iraq - are likely to be amenable. "All the doors to a political solution are closed," an influential Kurdish leader told TIME. "This may just be the drastic step necessary to open them up again...