Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...violence threatens to spoil the overriding U.S. objective in Iraq: brokering the formation of a broadly representative government, which the Bush Administration has hoped would defuse the Sunni-led insurgency and facilitate a substantial withdrawal of U.S. troops. To protest the other side's excesses, Sunni and Shi'ite leaders have both walked away from U.S.-led negotiations on the new government...
...Khalilzad intended to soothe the anxieties of the Sunnis the U.S. has tried to coax into the government, his comments only further outraged Shi'ites. For their part, Shi'ite politicians point out that thousands in their community have been killed in Sunni terrorist attacks since the fall of Saddam Hussein. "After every tragedy, every time that the terrorists pour [gasoline] over our emotions, we tell our people to be patient, to remain calm," said Jassim al-Mutairi, a political aide to al-Sadr. "But each time, we worry that the next [terrorist] attack will be the one to light...
...Samarra explosion was surely designed to set sectarian hostilities aflame. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the bombing of al-Askari, but suspicion fell on al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its leader there, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, subscribes to an extremist Sunni view that regards Shi'ism as an apostasy and all shrines as idolatrous abominations. Al-Zarqawi, whose group comprises mainly foreign jihadis, has encouraged his followers to attack Iraqi Shi'ite targets...
They could hardly have picked a more provocative one than al-Askari. It is associated with three venerated Shi'ite imams, including the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, who is believed to have disappeared in 878 into a tunnel directly under al-Askari. The two imams buried in the shrine were the Mahdi's father and grandfather. Most Shi'ites believe that the Mahdi will one day reappear as a messiah to bring justice to the world. That makes al-Askari one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites, exceeded in veneration only by the shrines of Najaf and Karbala. Even...
...grief hardened quickly into fury. Within 12 hours, Shi'ites across the country torched mosques, gunned down clerics and kidnapped Sunni families at gunpoint. As the violence escalated, it became less discriminating: among the victims were three journalists working for al-Arabiya television who were abducted and executed while reporting in Samarra. Gunmen then attacked the funeral cortege of one of the journalists, killing one person. On its way back from the cemetery outside Baghdad, the convoy was hit by a bomb, killing two others. On both sides, not all the stories of slaughter and desecration were immediately verifiable, since...