Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Middle East on July 24, she knew she was taking the biggest gamble of her public career. She had a planeful of reporters, no schedule and no winners up her sleeve. Her mission - to forge a deal that promised a lasting end of conflict between Israel and Lebanon's Shi'ite militants - was being widely dismissed as quixotic...
...Bint Jbeil was a prime target for the Israeli army. The largest Shi'a town in the border district, Bint Jbeil is populated with staunch supporters of Hizballah, whose fighters are battling Israeli forces. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah's secretary-general, gave his victory speech here in May 2000 after Hizballah succeeded in driving Israeli troops out of their occupation zone in south Lebanon. Then, Nasrallah had described Israel as being as weak as a spider's web. Yet while Hizballah's anti-tank-missile-wielding guerrillas had inflicted high casualties on the attacking Israelis, the battle had left...
...course, Sunnis and Shi'ites do sometimes cooperate. Ali Mohammed, a former Green Beret who pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaeda agent, testified in 2000 that he had provided security for a meeting in Sudan between Hizballah security chief Imad Mughniyah and Osama bin Laden and that Hizballah had provided al-Qaeda with explosives training. If there was cooperation, it seems to have been short-lived; the two groups certainly aren't allies. Lebanese police in April arrested nine men that Hizballah officials claim were al-Qaeda agents plotting to assassinate their leader. In a recently published interview with...
...Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. "Waging war in Iraq to combat terrorism has transformed Iraq into a nexus of terrorism it hadn't been before. Justifying the operation in Lebanon by putting Hizballah on the same terrorism shelf as al-Qaeda is getting radical Sunnis to back radical Shi'ites in a way we'd have never imagined." By failing to make distinctions between groups--differentiations that are clear to people who actually live with these various conflicts--Bush feeds Muslim paranoia that his war on terrorism is just a cover for a war on Islam. Says Brian Jenkins...
...peace in the Middle East is a Rubik's Cube whose every piece has to align properly to arrive at a solution, the puzzle posed by Hizballah seems to have more than six colors for six sides. The Shi'ite militia has skillful fighters, powerful patrons in Iran and Syria and roots so deep in Lebanon that it has become a state within a state. Israel couldn't beat it during 18 years of occupying Lebanon and last week had to withdraw its troops from the border village of Bint Jbeil, a Hizballah stronghold, after sustaining heavy losses. Yet unless...