Word: secte
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Here’s the real question, though: Are that many Americans really shocked, or are media outlets simply using what used to be a national issue to spark controversy against an oft-criticized sect of our population? After all, the days of politicians denouncing gangsta rap and smashing tapes on national TV are long gone. And besides a few Eminem references about Dick Cheney’s wife and the occasional hunting joke, the vice president’s name isn’t being trashed by rappers with anywhere near the same kind of ferocity...
...Inter-sect relations, political and personal, began to fray with the approach of Iraq's first post-Saddam election in January 2005. Sunni parties boycotted the poll, allowing a Shi'ite coalition to sweep to power. With an assertiveness that at times bordered on arrogance, the Shi'ite-led government inflamed Sunni resentment. An especially sore point was the mass recruitment into the police and the military of Shi'ite militiamen, some of whom used the immunity of their uniforms to avenge old grudges against Sunnis. Sunni terrorism groups stepped up their bombing campaign, which convinced Shi'ites that...
...majority, Sunni families have been forced to leave for fear of death. Sunnis have responded with their own sectarian cleansing. A large portion of the mostly Sunni middle and upper classes has fled the country; Jordan and Syria together now have nearly 2 million Iraqi expatriates. Inter-sect marriages have become less and less common. Zahra's father has refused to give his younger daughter permission to follow in her sister's footsteps and marry a Shi'ite. "He is the same man," Zahra says in her father's defense. "But the situation around him has changed...
...both sides are responsible for stoking tensions. Religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect, often backed and bankrolled by members of the Saudi royal family, contribute to the spread of sectarian violence by preaching a hard-line form of Sunni Islam that condemns all other strains as heresy. In Pakistan, moderate Muslims blame Wahhabi madrasahs as well as Iranian-funded Shi'ite seminaries for the escalation of Sunni-Shi'ite violence that has claimed more than 4,000 lives in the past two decades. In the latest attacks, three separate suicide bombings killed 21 during the Ashura rituals in January...
...Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East military expert and former national security aide to John McCain , says London's drawdown only cements Shi'ite power in southern Iraq. Shi'ite police in the region have been conducting sometimes deadly sect-based operations against Sunni residents for months, he says, and local politics have devolved into "a fractured mess" delinked from national political parties. "The coming British cuts in many ways reflect the political reality that the British `lost' the south more than a year ago," Cordesman, who has traveled to the region frequently, writes in a Wednesday analysis from his office...