Word: khalilzad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Khalilzad hasn't been able to make the good feelings last. Each side wants him to go to bat for it but suspects him of secretly playing for the other team. "They see everything very much in a zero-sum way," Khalilzad says. That he is of mixed parentage--his late father was a Sunni, his late mother a Shi'ite--doesn't automatically make him a neutral in the eyes of Iraqi politicians. As a representative of the country that smashed the Sunnis' stranglehold on power, he worked hard to overcome their suspicion, only to find himself...
...disgruntlement with Khalilzad reached a peak in late February, when he complained about sectarian abuses by al-Jaafari's Shi'ite government. His thinly disguised target was the Interior Ministry, which Sunnis say employs Shi'ite death squads. Shi'ites interpreted Khalilzad's comments as a threat to their influence. "They thought I was trying to give [the ministry] to the Sunnis," Khalilzad says. And justified or not, some Shi'ites say Khalilzad's slapdown contributed to the rage that erupted after the Feb. 22 terrorist bombing of the sacred Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, which left hundreds dead...
There's little doubt that the bombing has galvanized Khalilzad's diplomatic efforts, giving him in his meetings with Iraqi leaders an urgent, compelling talking point: the prospect of civil war. But a day spent with the ambassador as he shuttles across Baghdad reveals just how hard it will be for him to forge compromise. At his meeting with al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader's aides nod when Khalilzad says the political deadlock is creating a vacuum that encourages sectarian impulses. But al-Hakim wants to talk instead about the discovery last week of a bus containing the corpses...
...ITES ALWAYS SEE THEMSELVES AS THE victims," Khalilzad says as his convoy pulls up to the U.S. embassy, temporarily housed in what used to be Saddam Hussein's main palace. But Sunnis too are adept at the politics of victimhood. Later in the day, the ambassador holds a closed-door meeting in his small office with two representatives of the Sunni parties. One of them, Iyad al-Samarrai, then told TIME they asked Khalilzad to have U.S. forces stop the killing of Sunnis by Shi'ite death squads...
Such a request only highlights that Khalilzad has little influence on the forces driving the war. For all his success at bringing Sunni political groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces...