Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...organization founded by Yasser Arafat, whose members do not want to relinquish control of the Palestinian government to the upstarts. Both Palestinian officials and Israeli security experts say that a clash between the two forces is inevitable and could swiftly turn violent. The feud runs deep. Fatah members are secular, while Hamas' leadership is guided by the Koran. Palestinians complain that many of Arafat's old commanders are little better than gangsters, men who made fortunes when they arrived from exile in Tunis in 1994 by siphoning off aid, creating monopolies, grabbing property, and running protection rackets. Hamas militants...
...heads the coalition of Shi'ite parties that controls Iraq's incoming parliament. It didn't go well. For more than an hour, Khalilzad tried to persuade al-Hakim to help revive the Iraqi political process, stalled in part because the Shi'ites refuse to bend to demands by secular, Kurdish and Sunni parties that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari not be given a second term. Al-Hakim didn't want to confront his fellow Shi'ite. But he had another idea: Couldn't Khalilzad nudge al-Jaafari aside? Khalilzad kept a straight face at the suggestion...
Whereas his predecessors Paul Bremer and John Negroponte often seemed remote to Iraqi politicians, Khalilzad, a secular Muslim who speaks Farsi and some Arabic, is informal and chatty. In meetings with Iraqi leaders, he sips sweetened black tea and indulges their speechifying without asking for translation. Iraqi leaders say they see him as one of their own, crediting his Afghan upbringing for his accommodating manner. Says Humam Hamoodi, a leading politician of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI): "The way he sits, the way he eats, we feel he's no stranger...
Such a request only highlights that Khalilzad has little influence on the forces driving the war. For all his success at bringing Sunni political groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces...
...moment is the deep division over who should be Iraq's next prime minister. The Shi'ite alliance that won the largest block of seats in the Dec 15 general election has nominated Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who is 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...