Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's a familiar situation for Khalilzad these days. As Iraq's political parties squabble over the nature and composition of a new government, sectarian violence has pushed the country closer than ever to full-bore civil war. U.S. commanders believe that Sunni-Shi'ite violence is surpassing jihadi terrorism as the biggest threat to the country's long-term stability. And yet the prospect of a deeper, more vicious war has so far failed to prod the country's leaders into setting aside their rivalries and forming a broadly representative government, which may be the U.S.'s best hope...
...last. Each side wants him to go to bat for it but suspects him of secretly playing for the other team. "They see everything very much in a zero-sum way," Khalilzad says. That he is of mixed parentage--his late father was a Sunni, his late mother a Shi'ite--doesn't automatically make him a neutral in the eyes of Iraqi politicians. As a representative of the country that smashed the Sunnis' stranglehold on power, he worked hard to overcome their suspicion, only to find himself in the doghouse with the Shi'ites."He wants...
...Shi'ite disgruntlement with Khalilzad reached a peak in late February, when he complained about sectarian abuses by al-Jaafari's Shi'ite government. His thinly disguised target was the Interior Ministry, which Sunnis say employs Shi'ite death squads. Shi'ites interpreted Khalilzad's comments as a threat to their influence. "They thought I was trying to give [the ministry] to the Sunnis," Khalilzad says. And justified or not, some Shi'ites say Khalilzad's slapdown contributed to the rage that erupted after the Feb. 22 terrorist bombing of the sacred Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, which left hundreds...
...political deadlock is creating a vacuum that encourages sectarian impulses. But al-Hakim wants to talk instead about the discovery last week of a bus containing the corpses of 18 men, many of them clearly garroted. News reports said the men were Sunnis; al-Hakim says they were Shi'ites. Khalilzad is caught off guard. "The BBC said the men were Sunnis," he says. But al-Hakim angrily insists the victims were Shi'ites, pilgrims returning from a tour of the holy city of Najaf. (Five days after the massacre, the bodies had not yet been identified.) When Khalilzad...
...SHI'ITES ALWAYS SEE THEMSELVES AS THE victims," Khalilzad says as his convoy pulls up to the U.S. embassy, temporarily housed in what used to be Saddam Hussein's main palace. But Sunnis too are adept at the politics of victimhood. Later in the day, the ambassador holds a closed-door meeting in his small office with two representatives of the Sunni parties. One of them, Iyad al-Samarrai, then told TIME they asked Khalilzad to have U.S. forces stop the killing of Sunnis by Shi'ite death squads...