Word: sheiking
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...local allies have certainly made massive security gains in Diyala. The al-Qaeda-inspired insurgent groups that once rampaged through the province have been reduced to a handful of criminal cells that attempt the occasional assassination, according to Sheik Hussam al-Mojjma, head of the local Awakening Council - the Sunni citizens brigade largely responsible for defeating al-Qaeda. "When we started fighting al-Qaeda [in 2007] it was just us and the Americans," he says. "Not the army, not the police." But he isn't happy about the way he and his men were treated by the Shi'ite-dominated...
...Only 4,000 of the Awakening Council's 23,000 men were given jobs in the police and security forces, according to al-Mojjma. "It's all sectarian," says the sheik, whose headquarters are a concrete hut with no furniture on the eastern edge of Baquba. "The government doesn't trust us because we are Sunni. [But] if they push us any more, we are going to explode." He is particularly worried about what will happen once the U.S. pulls out of Iraq. "Iran will take us," he says. "Everyone in the region will try to occupy Iraq." But what...
Somalia is much on the minds of those fighting terrorism these days. On Feb. 1, Sheik Fuad Mohamed Shangole, a leader of an Islamist group known as al-Shabab (the Youth), which is fighting for control of the nation on the Horn of Africa, made a public declaration of allegiance to Osama bin Laden. If that summons memories of the old relationship between the Afghan Taliban and bin Laden, it should. Both Somalia and Afghanistan have been at war for more than a generation. Both wars have followed a similar progression: a toppling of the central government that was followed...
...Africa, after its forces invaded Somalia in 2006 and toppled an earlier Islamist government whose more extreme members had unwisely declared jihad on Somalia's bigger and more Christian neighbor to the west. But many members of the TFG seem to effectively live in Nairobi. (Exceptions include President Sheik Sharif Ahmed and his Defense Minister, Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a veteran warlord who survived an assassination attempt by suicide bomb in Mogadishu on Feb. 15.) Despite the protection of 5,300 African Union (A.U.) troops - mainly Ugandans and Burundians - the TFG in reality controls little more than a few blocks...
Progress will be slow. A recent government reshuffle has moved power away from technocratic experts and outside consultants, and back into the hands of the royal family, especially the crown prince, Sheik Hamdan. But without oil money of its own, Dubai has little choice but to listen to its foreign creditors and stakeholders. And wealthy as they are, the leaders of the gulf countries also know their societies have to eventually change too, says economist Sfakianakis. Oil generates wealth, but the oil industry doesn't generate many jobs. Even in rich Saudi Arabia, unemployment is officially 11.6% - and that...