Word: saddamism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nothing is more divisive than power and money. Only four years after the U.S. and its allies set up an enclave in northern Iraq to protect 4 million Kurds from annihilation by Saddam Hussein's vengeful army, the Kurds are threatening to annihilate themselves--because two rival leaders each hope to establish and control an independent Kurdistan overlapping the borders of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Massoud Barzani, who leads the western half of the enclave, is shy, soft spoken and uncomfortable around foreigners. Jalal Talabani, who controls the east, is a garrulous jet-setter who mixes well at embassy...
...Kurdistan, the two factions skirmish and engage in terrorist acts. Three weeks ago, for example, a car bomb exploded in Zakhu, near the Turkish border, injuring 50 people. U.S. intelligence analysts haven't pinned down which side carried out the bombing or whether it was the work of Saddam's agents trying to incite more trouble between the two factions...
...Kurdish leaders ought to be joining hands to secure their independence from an increasingly shaky Saddam, who escaped yet another coup attempt earlier this month. Instead Kurds are killing one another, and northern Iraq and beyond are growing dangerously unstable. Meanwhile, neighboring Turkey, at war with rebellious Kurds in its provinces, was in turmoil last week from rioting by extremist Islamic and nationalist groups. "The area is extremely volatile--all of it," says a worried senior Clinton Administration official. Still more tinder piled up last week after Saddam seized two American civilians who seemed to have accidentally wandered across...
...internecine conflict comes at a time when Saddam's political standing has begun to falter, say U.S. intelligence officials. Last week Washington succeeded in persuading the U.N. Security Council to continue, at least until May, the near total economic embargo that Baghdad desperately wants lifted. Middle-class Iraqi families are drawing from savings to pay for food. The dinar, which traded a year ago at 150 to the dollar, has plunged to 1,500 against the dollar. Crime is rampant in the capital, which has also experienced a rash of car-bomb attacks by dissidents and possibly Iranian agents. There...
Early in March, an elaborate coup plot against Saddam was hatched that required the cooperation of the feuding Kurds. But within hours of the attack, the entire plan collapsed. In the first stage, as planned, Talabani's 10,000 troops launched an opening skirmish against the Iraqi army's 5th Corps along the Kurdish border near Kirkuk. Barzani, who has a force of equal strength, refused to get involved in the coup. Shi'ite insurgents next failed to undertake their strike against Iraqi forces in the southern part of the country, and an Iraqi armored division that was to mutiny...