Word: shying
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There is an old Arabic proverb: "My brother and I against my cousin, but my cousin and I against the stranger." It didn't hold true in Iraq for long. Three years after the 2003 U.S. invasion, Sunni brothers and their Shi'ite cousins were slaughtering one another while also fighting against the American stranger. The U.S. is now winding down its mission and preparing to withdraw, but has Iraq's family feud been settled...
Still, that's not good enough for some Iraqis, especially Sunnis worried about their co-religionists, who make up 80% of Bucca's detainee population. The Tawafuk Front, the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc with 44 of the legislature's 275 seats, says it doesn't trust the Shi'ite-led government and wants all of the detainees immediately released, even "the minority" they acknowledge might be al-Qaeda members. "Even if you released an al-Qaeda emir [leader], he won't be able to wreak havoc in the same way he did three years ago," says Omar Almashhadani, a spokesman...
...good news is that the ghost of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal seems to have been laid to rest. The bad news is that detainee families from across the sectarian spectrum don't trust their government. Salam Baten al-Attiya, 30, a Shi'ite from Sadr City, was at Bucca last week to visit his brother Ali, who was picked up by U.S troops on suspicion of being a member of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. "My brother has been here for a year and a month; keep him here for another year and a month...
...during a Baghdad press conference late last year was sentenced on Thursday to three years in prison after being found guilty of "assaulting a foreign leader on an official visit." But despite the verdict of Baghdad's Central Criminal Court, many ordinary Iraqis still hail the 30-year-old Shi'ite shoe thrower as a national hero...
...Wael Abdel-Latif al-Fadel, a Shi'ite parliamentarian and former judge, isn't optimistic about al-Zaidi's chances of prevailing on appeal. "The ruling is in line with Iraqi law. George Bush was visiting Iraq as a head of state," he said. "He should have been treated with the Arab hospitality that our traditions dictate, not the actions of Muntazer al-Zaidi...