Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...outcome is still far from settled. What started as a U.S. counteroffensive against insurgents on two fronts had by the end of last week become a tense standoff in Shi'ite-and Sunni-dominated regions. U.S. officials held talks with Iraqi intermediaries aimed at suspending coalition military assaults, which many pro-American Iraqis believed was doing more harm than good in winning hearts and minds across the country. The diplomatic tack looked more likely to bear fruit in the Shi'ite-dominated south, where fighters loyal to the young Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seemed to be abiding...
...easy. For one thing, the decision to involve even low-level members of the former regime is deeply controversial among Iraq's majority Shi'ites, who suffered hugely at the hands of Baathists under Saddam. Brahimi has yet to secure the backing of Iraq's most important Shi'ite, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, who has so far refused to endorse any of the plans for creating a new Iraqi government. Brahimi has conferred with Sistani's son; Brahimi's spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, does not rule out the possibility that Sistani will demand guarantees that, among other things, the future...
...Americans or their allies on the Governing Council. But members of the post--June 30 government still have to be effectively blessed by foreigners--a point not lost on Iraqis. "They cannot fix a wrong with a wrong," says Salah Hassan Habib, 22, a butcher in a Shi'ite neighborhood in Baghdad. "The next government should be elected." The U.N.'s reputation in Iraq is hardly lustrous: ordinary Iraqis suffered for more than a decade under sanctions enacted in the U.N.'s name. Also, since Saddam's fall, the newly free Iraqi press has uncovered evidence of massive corruption...
Chalabi's fall from grace began the moment he arrived in Iraq. An exile for almost 46 of his 59 years, Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite, had no constituency inside the country. When the CIA refused to provide weapons to his ragtag band of mercenaries, the Pentagon armed them over the agency's objections. Within days of their arrival, some of Chalabi's forces claimed houses, buildings, document caches and vehicles in Baghdad that belonged to the former regime. Eventually the U.S. disarmed those members of the militia it could still track down. Among Iraqis, Chalabi, dogged by charges that...
...jihadists around the world to join in an effort to start a civil war in Iraq. With the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis approaching, the writer argued, "the only way to prolong the duration of the fight" was to foment conflict between the country's Sunni and Shi'ite populations and "bring the Shi'a into the battle." Though the letter was undated and unsigned, U.S. intelligence officials detected in its aims and bravado--the author claimed to have directed 25 suicide bombings--the imprint of Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a longtime ally of Osama bin Laden...