Word: shied
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Despite this week's carnage the absolute number of bombings is still far lower than it was one year ago. The problem, however, is not simply lives lost, but also what the slow increase in attacks says about the resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. Battered by Shi'ite militias, the U.S. military and the defection of more moderate insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other radical insurgent groups are much weaker now than they were just last summer. But, as U.S. officials are quick to acknowledge, they still have the men, the money and the organization to pose a serious...
...turning ugly. The country fought a devastating civil war from 1975 to 1990, mostly along religious lines: Christian vs. Muslim. Today the battle lines are forming once again between, on the one side, Christian and Sunni Muslim groups allied with the U.S.-backed government, and ranged against them, Shi'ite Muslim and Christian groups that form an opposition movement supported by Syria and Iran...
...These tensions - heightened by concern over the possibility of another war with Israel - often spill onto the court. Because Lebanon's Shi'ites generally prefer soccer (perhaps reflecting their status as a traditionally disenfranchised minority), the main hoops action tends to be Christian vs. Christian, and Christian vs. Sunni. In fact, basketball is an extension of politics to such a degree that when General Michel Aoun, a Christian leader, turned against the country's mainline pro-government Christians, one of the first things he did was start a new basketball team, the Blue Stars...
That means tens of thousands of people like Hadi Shaker Hamadi are left to fend for themselves in what remains one of the world biggest humanitarian crises. A Shi'ite, Hamadi was working as a farmhand in Samarra four years ago when he began getting threats from Sunni militants in the area. Several of his friends had already been murdered in sectarian violence, he said. So he decided to move his wife and seven children out. They headed to Baghdad, where they had no family who might help them. Arriving in the city, they looked around for areas where they...
...nature of most legislative processes in democracies? As with anything in Iraq, there was a lot more to this veto than a quibble about constitutional law. The dissenting vote on the Presidential Council was cast by Vice President Adel Abdul-Medhi whose Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC) is the Shi'a power bloc with relatively closer ties to the U.S. than the rival party run by Shi'ite strongman Moqtada al-Sadr, who leads the contentious, trigger-happy Mahdi Army. Abdul-Medhi said that the Provincial Powers law contravened the constitutional right of voters of each province to elect their...