Word: shi'a
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...apart from other Baluch outfits warring on the Pakistani side against Islamabad by their staunchly religious character. "The Baluch nationalists aren't really sectarian," says Syed Adnan, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. "Jundallah sees itself fighting a Sunni war against the Shi'a Islamic Republic [of Iran...
Tehran and Islamabad had largely cordial ties until Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. By the 1990s, they found themselves facing each other across a post-Cold War battle line as Pakistan built up the Afghan Taliban, whose Sunni puritanism grated against Iran's state Shi'ism. Following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Islamabad allowed the U.S. the use of two military bases in Pakistani Baluchistan for counterterror operations. This predictably drew Iran's ire and deepened its fears of external forces conspiring to undermine its interests both at home and in Afghanistan...
...tourism and professional services hub. Bahrain - another of Dubai's challengers in financial services - has a thriving banking industry and the most ethnically and religiously diverse local population in the gulf. But its tolerant feel is threatened by tensions between the élite Sunni minority and the less powerful Shi'ite majority, as well as Islamist political parties that have benefited from the kingdom's tentative experiments with democratic elections. (See 10 Things to Do in Dubai...
...Qaeda-inspired Islamic caliphate is often a flag of convenience for other motives. Some joined the Taliban for revenge against Islamabad for past assaults against their tribes and for U.S. drone strikes. Others, especially along the Khyber Pass, are common bandits, while still others are sectarian, feuding with Shi'ite tribes. In general, the Pakistani Taliban are united in fighting against Islamabad, while the Afghan Taliban, with whom they are allied spiritually and often times logistically, are bent on killing American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan...
...Halabja, in northern Iraq, in 1988. The massacre, which killed about 5,000 people, is believed to be the deadliest chemical attack on civilians in history. That year Majid led a campaign that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds, and in the 1990s his victims included thousands of Shi'ites rebelling against the Baathist regime. In 2003, when the U.S. military put together a deck of cards with pictures of Iraq's most wanted, Majid was depicted as the king of spades...