Word: shi'a
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Recently, that wound threatened to rip open. One evening in December, thousands of protesters from the Shi'ite Muslim group Hizballah and other factions threatened to storm the gates of the Sérail, calling the Western-backed Siniora a traitor for allegedly undermining Hizballah during its war with Israel four months earlier. Only a week before, masked gunmen had assassinated one of Siniora's Cabinet colleagues, Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel. For hours, nobody knew if the mob would overwhelm the guards, enter the building, drag Siniora and his ministers from office - and perhaps ignite a new civil...
...early March, say the law's detractors. "The feeling is that the law is focused very much on sectarianism," says Saleh al-Mutlaq, who heads the National Dialogue Front, a small secular party with 11 seats in parliament. "It divides the country and the wealth into groups - Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites," he said on the phone from Amman on Tuesday...
...negotiators from Kurdistan, where there is deep distrust of Baghdad's politicians. Under the law, companies can deal with both the central Ministry of Oil, as well as regional entities. But that concession has provoked intense anxiety that Iraq could break apart, if some regions - or perhaps even powerful Shi'ite clans in southern Iraq - calculate that they can finance autonomous states from their massive oil deposits...
...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...
...fact, Cordesman fears that the brutal Shi'ite control of Basra and southern Iraq will spread to greater Baghdad and make the already bad situation there that much worse. Shi'ite militias in the capital appear to be standing down and not challenging U.S. and Iraqi forces as they attempt to quell the bombings and bloodshed that have gripped the city for the past year. That leaves insurgent Sunnis as the main target of the effort. "In effect," Cordesman says, "both the U.K. and the U.S. may end up acting to expand Shi'ite influence in very different ways." That...