Word: sectarianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...welcome political and business leaders to Egypt for a World Economic Forum gathering later this month. The bombings underscored Mubarak's inability to eliminate the terrorist threat, which has hurt the country's $7 billion tourism industry. But that is only one of the regime's problems. Long-simmering sectarian tensions erupted into rioting and street fighting between Muslim fundamentalists and Coptic Christians in Alexandria in mid-April. And police clashed last week in Cairo with demonstrators protesting disciplinary action against two high-court judges who alleged widespread vote-rigging in last November's parliamentary elections - an embarrassing episode...
...early hours of April 17 when a two-day firefight between local insurgents on one side and Iraqi soldiers and American GIs on the other broke out. Though the encounter was minimized by top U.S. military officials, the battle appears to have been a more serious outbreak of sectarian violence, between well-organized units of the insurgency and what military sources suspect was a Shi'ite death squad linked to the U.S.-backed Iraqi government...
...question is exactly what triggered this battle and who fought it. Sunni community leaders claim that local residents grabbed whatever weapons they had to defend their homes from a sectarian attack by Shi'ite militias in government uniforms. They say night guards, akin to an armed neighborhood watch, fired back at roaming gunmen strafing them as they stood watch. However, American officers say the men they ended up fighting weren't mere homeowners. They used the fire and movement techniques of trained soldiers. "These guys who stood and fought were not just neighborhood types," says Markos, a steely artillery officer...
...staffing of the security ministries is closely tied to the challenge of curbing the sectarian militias that Khalilzad has called "the infrastructure of civil war." Maliki's position, like that of Jaafari, is that the militias must be absorbed into the new security forces. That's an option that has critics worried, because if they keep their shape and leadership, then incorporating them simply gives militias official license to operate, in much the same the way that critics have charged that the Interior Ministry commandoes double as a Shi'ite militia...
...Kurdish example, where the "peshmerga" forces loyal to the region's two main political parties have been rebranded as units of the new security forces. The Kurdish leaders aren't about to accept the breakup and dispersal of the peshmerga into a wider army on a non-sectarian basis, so Maliki may be able to get away with his position, insisting that what's good for the Kurds is good for everyone else...