Word: sectarian
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...descending further into butchery - and quite possibly civil war. But almost as disturbing is the growing evidence that the massacres and others like it are being tolerated and even abetted by Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated police forces, overseen by Iraq's Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr. On his watch, sectarian militias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and stymied investigations into Interior...
...infrastructure of civil war," U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told TIME recently. Khalilzad has been publicly critical of Jabr and warned that the new security ministries under the next, permanent Iraqi government should be run by competent people who have no ties to militias and who are "non-sectarian." Further U.S. support for training the police and army, he said, depends...
Before the usual voices claim that the sectarian violence in Iraq is evidence of the futility of toppling Saddam Hussein, consider that the worst repressor of individual freedom in the Middle East--Iran--is still busy fomenting strife among its neighbors. Iran's militant regime is sowing chaos in the Middle East as it goes flat out to develop nuclear weapons. It needs a distracted West and a war-torn Iraq to accomplish that goal...
...accept the argument that the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq has nothing to do with 24 years of Sunni oppression of Shi'ites and Kurds under Saddam but is the result of the incompetent U.S. invasion. What about the passion to avenge atrocities committed by the former regime? The U.S. can't be blamed for that. Still, Iraqis are probably better off with a dictator, somebody to force them to get along. They thrive on dictatorships and blood feuds...
...insurgents, 17 of which had already been cleared and released. The area, explained the officials, has long been suspected of being used as a base for insurgents operating in and around Samarra, the city north of Baghdad where the bombing of a sacred shrine recently sparked a wave of sectarian violence...