Word: sectarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That's a familiar situation for Khalilzad these days. As Iraq's political parties squabble over the nature and composition of a new government, sectarian violence has pushed the country closer than ever to full-bore civil war. U.S. commanders believe that Sunni-Shi'ite violence is surpassing jihadi terrorism as the biggest threat to the country's long-term stability. And yet the prospect of a deeper, more vicious war has so far failed to prod the country's leaders into setting aside their rivalries and forming a broadly representative government, which may be the U.S.'s best hope...
...prime minister of the interim government. But Kurdish, Sunni and secular parties have in recent days mounted a strong challenge, demanding that Jaafari's nomination be withdrawn. They blame Jaafari for the interim government's many failings, including its failure to act quickly and decisively to prevent the sectarian conflagration that followed the Samarra blast...
...majority in the parliament, and in recent days, fissures have appeared in the Shi'ite alliance. But Jaafari is backed by the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, an unpredictable political maverick with an armed militia, known as the Mahdi Army, that is widely blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence...
...What has changed? Since 2004, India and Pakistan have been engaged in their first-ever meaningful peace process and taken significant steps to normalize relations. What's more, India's Hindu right wing, which rose to prominence by stoking sectarian hatred and held power from 1997 to 2004 under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is in disarray. The party has yet to recover from its election defeat two years ago and the round of bitter infighting that followed...
...Moreover, as relations with Pakistan warm, India's nationalist hawks are all too eager to find another "anti-India" bogeyman in the rising Islamic fundamentalist movement in India's its eastern neighbor, Bangladesh. Nor is the absence of a riot much to celebrate. But given the subcontinent's bloody, sectarian history, it's a start...