Word: itely
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Wednesday's bloodbath in Baghdad is a stark reminder that while the U.S. troop surge into the capital has brought a significant decline in sectarian killings by Shi'ite death squads, the Sunni insurgency and its terror attacks on Shi'ite civilians have continued to take a dreadful toll. More than 150 people were killed Wednesday as explosion after explosion rocked Shi'ite neighborhoods: The attacks left more than 100 workers dead in a Shi'ite neighborhood food market; more than 40 dead at a police checkpoint; and 11 killed in front of a hospital...
...major reason that the sectarian violence levels are down may be that the Shi'ite Mahdi Army, perpetrator of much of the worst sectarian killing, has decided for tactical reasons to lie low. Its leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his allies in Iraq's government appear to have decided that they're better off waiting out the U.S. surge rather than trying to fight it head-on. After all, they dominate several of Iraq's key ministries and many of its military and police units. If and when the Americans leave, they hope to be well positioned to pursue their...
...primarily a non-Iraqi Sunni group, had long teamed up with Iraqi Sunni insurgents. But tensions between the two camps escalated in the fall, when al-Qaeda created a new jihadi supergroup called the Islamic State of Iraq to unite the disparate cells fighting the U.S. and Shi'ite militias. Al-Qaeda demanded that all insurgent groups swear loyalty to the new organization, but some of the most active Iraqi nationalist networks, like the Islamic Army, refused. According to the Islamic Army's letter, al-Qaeda "went too far" and retaliated "by killing 30 mujahedin brothers...
...Parliament, a suicide truck bomb collapsed the Al-Sarafiyah bridge in Baghdad. Some 10 people were killed as their vehicles fell into the Tigris River below. The sagging steel trusses of the bridge, which was built by British engineers over half a century ago to connect the predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood Atafiyah with the Sunni area of Waziriyah, provided another sad reminder to residents of the widening sectarian divisions in the capital...
...Rice hopes to use forum to rally regional powers and push Iran onto the defensive, according to a State Department official, by repeating U.S. charges that Iran is sending materials for armor-piercing road-side bombs to Shi'ite militias in Iraq. But Iraqi leaders are wary of being drawn into a U.S.-Iran conflict, and while they support calls for Iran to stop the flow of weapons into their country, they have also pressed the U.S. on the case of five Iranians arrested by the U.S. military in Erbil in January. Washington has thus far rebuffed calls for their...