Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...strained. Al-Zarqawi's jihad was more rigidly uncompromising than bin Laden's: it wasn't enough to kill Westerners, it was just as important to slaughter fellow Arabs who followed a different form of Islam. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had been suspicious of Shi'ites but learned to work with them. In al-Zarqawi's eyes, Iraq's Shi'ites were apostates because their practice of Islam differs from the extreme Wahhabist version he embraced. For that, they deserved even more gruesome punishment than nonbelievers. Fighters from his inner circle told TIME he lost...
...just his insistence on remaining on the front lines of the battle that set him apart from his al-Qaeda elders. As the insurgency unfolded, al-Zarqawi articulated and then acted upon an ideology more forbidding and toxic than even bin Laden may have imagined. In branding Shi'ites as betrayers of the faith and calling for their liquidation, al-Zarqawi stoked a war within Islam itself--one that is being played out in the streets of Iraq every day, with Iraqis engaging in the kind of sectarian frenzy that al-Zarqawi had advocated all along...
...campaign has shattered the centuries-old sectarian balance in Iraq and set Shi'ites and Sunnis at one another's throats. The ensuing civil war may be al-Zarqawi's most poisonous legacy. In his last known communiqué, an audiotape released just days before he was killed, he exhorted Sunnis to "get rid of the infidel snakes ... and don't listen to those advocating an end to sectarianism and calling for national unity...
...early this year, the secret task force's luck began to change. Tips came in from Iraqi insurgents, former Baath Party members loyal to Saddam, some of whom objected to al-Zarqawi's viciousness and attacks against Shi'ites. U.S. officials say they also received valuable assistance from the government of Jordan, al-Zarqawi's home country. A Jordanian security official tells TIME that one month after the November 2005 suicide attacks on three hotels in Amman, which killed 60 people, Jordanian King Abdullah II ordered his intelligence officials to set up a new security branch, the Knights...
...faction has been linked to some of the worst attacks in Iraq, homegrown Iraqi insurgents have shown themselves perfectly capable of building and deploying the improvised explosives that continue to bedevil and kill fellow citizens and U.S. troops. The sectarian violence al-Zarqawi helped spark with brutal attacks on Shi'ite "infidels" has taken root in the lawless country, with illegal militias and death squads murdering thousands of Iraqis in the past six months...