Word: maliki
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...measure of how much safer Iraq is these days that some 6,000 people jammed Baghdad's basketball stadium last week to attend a public rally for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Two years ago, at the height of Iraq's sectarian civil war, no one would have dared show up, but this 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...
...Iraq's reconciliation process clearly still has a long way to go. A number of times during al-Maliki's conciliatory speech, the crowd expressed its enthusiasm in an unabashedly sectarian vocabulary. "We are with you, Ali!" they chanted, referring to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Shi'ites believe was cheated out of the leadership of the community of the faithful more than 1,000 years ago in the original schism with the Sunnis. (See pictures of Iraqis preparing to vote...
...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 fears that Sunnis might once again boycott the election and that their alienation from it could once again translate into violence against...
...year, Iraqis 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...
...blasts occurred amid rancorous and sectarian political debate in Iraq. The predominantly Shi'ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had somehow managed to ban many important Sunni politicians from running in parliamentary elections scheduled for March 7. This comes just as the large Sunni minority - the base for much of the radical resistance to the government - had decided it wanted to participate in the vote, having been shut out of political power by boycotting the last major election. Now, nearly two score people were dead and U.S. Apache helicopters were patrolling the air in the aftermath of another...