Word: ites
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...warm-up for the March 7 election was a surprisingly relaxed event. The rings of police around the stadium didn't bother to check for car bombs and gave only one brief pat-down for weapons at the entrance. Inside, al-Maliki, though the head of the Islamist Shi'ite Dawa party, introduced a cross-section list of candidates running for parliament as part of his State of Law coalition. Al-Maliki's speech proclaimed that Iraq's days of misery and mistrust were over. "We defeated the terrorists," he said. "We defeated the militias. And we have begun reconciliation...
...surface, there is a new spirit of national unity. All the political coalitions contesting Sunday's election have at least some semblance of sectarian diversity. Even the most homogeneous of the big blocs pretend to be more diverse than they really are. For example, the Shi'ite Islamist bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, which critics suspect would like to spin off oil-rich Shi'ite southern Iraq into an autonomous region, includes one Sunni party from Anbar province. When asked, many average Iraqis say sectarian violence was something forced on them by outsiders, a bad dream from which they...
...Indeed, Iraq's politicians still play the sectarian card when it suits them. Last month, the Justice and Accountability Commission, a secretive government de-Baathification committee headed by prominent Shi'ite politicians, banned some 500 candidates - most of them Sunni and secular - from running in the parliamentary election, without ever showing any evidence that linked them to the Baath party. Some critics saw the move as a last-minute attempt by al-Maliki's campaign, which had also been running campaign ads showing Saddam-era atrocities against Shi'ites, to reconnect with the Shi'ite political base. The move raised...
...could revert to settling their political disputes in the streets. "The problem is the police," he says. "The police are all local, so the local parties can manipulate them." For now, though, al-Mahdwe, who belongs to a Sunni party that opposes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led governing coalition, is more worried about an élite counterterrorism unit run by Maliki's office, which he accuses of arresting scores of opposition politicians and government critics in Diyala. Two months ago, they took the deputy governor, Mohammad Hussein al-Joubouri, and nothing has been heard since about...
...Sunni citizens brigade largely responsible for defeating al-Qaeda. "When we started fighting al-Qaeda [in 2007] it was just us and the Americans," he says. "Not the army, not the police." But he isn't happy about the way he and his men were treated by the Shi'ite-dominated government once they began to disband...