Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...Maliki appears remarkably similar to the man for whom he effectively served as a spokesman for the past year. Like Jaafari, Maliki is a Shi'ite Islamist of the Dawa party who spent some of his exile in Iran (the rest was in Damascus, while Jaafari went to London); like Jaafari he owes his position to the backing of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both men have been accused of having a sectarian outlook despite their public embrace of national unity; both are Iraqi nationalists who oppose the dismembering of Iraq into semi-autonomous mini states; both would also...
...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...