Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happens, this time the lines in the sand will more likely be between Sunnis. Iraq's minority Sunnis have become increasingly split between those like Sheik Hamid, who are now allied with the Shi'ite-led government, and Sunnis who are against it. Some co-religionists remain so antigovernment that they either have returned to the insurgency or sympathize with those who have. (See pictures of the sheiks who helped bring stability to Anbar province...
Those suspicions made some members of the Sahwa easy pickings for a tenacious insurgency that has capitalized on the rising resentment many in the Sunni community feel toward Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government. Among their complaints: that Baghdad has sometimes been a month or two late in forking over the $300-a-month salary for Sahwa patrolmen; that Sahwa leaders have been arrested, sometimes on charges harking back to their insurgent past, despite promises of amnesty; and most significant, that the government has been slow to make good on its pledge to incorporate...
...senior Sahwa tribal sheiks are al-Qaeda's "enemy No. 1," according to the source, because as Sunnis, they stood against their co-religionists in the insurgency and sided with a Shi'ite-led government. (The Americans have dropped to fourth on the enemies list, he adds, after Iraqi security forces and all those who work in the government.) Low-level Sahwa members have been encouraged to return to the jihadis' fold. Indeed, in mid-March, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), al-Qaeda in Iraq's main front group, posted a communique on several jihadist websites announcing an amnesty...
Even as Iraq's Sunni-Shi'ite divide appears to be tenuously mending, another seam in the country's patchwork multiethnic and sectarian society is on the verge of unraveling. Territorial disputes between Arabs and Kurds - in the provinces of Nineveh, Kirkuk and Diyala - now pose a serious risk of violence...
Kurds say al-Maliki has been quietly rotating senior Kurdish officers out of army units stationed in volatile provinces, including Nineveh, and replacing them with Arabs. That's disputed by Major General Hassan Kareem Abbas, the Shi'ite commander of the Nineveh Operations Command. Kurdish officers have been replaced, the general says, but by other Kurds, a view supported privately by senior U.S. officers in Mosul...