Word: shi'a
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...this warm-up for the March 7 election was a surprisingly relaxed event. The rings of police around the stadium didn't bother to check for car bombs and gave only one brief pat-down for weapons at the entrance. Inside, al-Maliki, though the head of the Islamist Shi'ite Dawa party, introduced a cross-section list of candidates running for parliament as part of his State of Law coalition. Al-Maliki's speech proclaimed that Iraq's days of misery and mistrust were over. "We defeated the terrorists," he said. "We defeated the militias. And we have begun...
...glimmer of what Iraq might look like without Americans, take a drive east of Baghdad to Diyala province, whose mixed Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish population is the country in microcosm. U.S. soldiers now rarely leave their bases outside Iraq's cities and towns, leaving security on the road to Diyala largely in the hands of the Iraqi security forces. The soldiers and police who man the many checkpoints wear the latest fashion in pattern-disrupting camouflage uniforms and patches that say "Special Forces" or "SWAT." But they still rely on controversial antenna-rod bomb detectors that may in fact...
...center of Iraq's citrus-growing region, is a largely colorless place, except for the winter orange harvest and the hundreds of campaign posters for Sunday's nationwide elections that now line the city's trash-filled streets. Still, at least the sectarian power struggle between Sunnis and Shi'ites that once raged through the city is now mostly confined to the ballot box. (See pictures of Iraq's revival...
...Iraqis could revert to settling their political disputes in the streets. "The problem is the police," he says. "The police are all local, so the local parties can manipulate them." For now, though, al-Mahdwe, who belongs to a Sunni party that opposes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led governing coalition, is more worried about an élite counterterrorism unit run by Maliki's office, which he accuses of arresting scores of opposition politicians and government critics in Diyala. Two months ago, they took the deputy governor, Mohammad Hussein al-Joubouri, and nothing has been heard since...
...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 government once they began to disband...