Word: shying
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...Mosul in the face of a major offensive will be looking to lie low and wait out the operation. How long al-Maliki will remain in Mosul is unclear. But the city's experienced fighters likely have more patience than a Prime Minister juggling two other running battles with Shi'ite militias in Baghdad and Basra...
Hizballah's victory was hardly a surprise. Its Shi'ite militiamen, who number in the thousands and are armed by Syria and Iran, have survived battle with the mighty Israeli army, while the supporters of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government are poorly armed amateurs on neighborhood patrol. Neither the police nor the military--which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and training from the U.S.--dared to lift a finger against Hizballah. Long after the militiamen had withdrawn from the streets, the army said it would intervene in any ongoing clashes but added that it would...
Sounds familiar? Think of Iraq, where a U.S.-backed government is bunkered down in the Green Zone, fighting fitfully against Shi'ite militias. Or of Palestine, where despite U.S. support and aid, President Mahmoud Abbas is powerless against the Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza. When dealing with internecine Arab conflict, the Bush Administration has never been able to back the winning team; it invariably attaches unrealistic expectations to moderate parties and underestimates extremist groups. The lesson, says Bilal Saab, a Lebanon expert at the Brookings Institution, is that "you can't pick sides in a civil...
Nasrallah unleashed his fighters on the streets of Beirut after the government tried to shut down Hizballah's private telecommunications network. But he has been spoiling for this fight since November 2006, when Shi'ite parties walked out of Siniora's coalition Cabinet. Although Lebanon is a democracy, the legitimacy of its government depends on a system of sectarian quotas; without the Shi'ites--the country's largest, fastest-growing group--the Prime Minister, a Sunni, has lacked both validity and street cred. The Shi'ites' price for returning: a greater share of power, including the right to veto major...
...Druze are legendary for their ferocity in defending their traditional mountain stronghold in the Chouf. It was reported that some Druze supporters of the Hizballah coalition even switched sides in the battles to join Jumblatt's men against the Shi'ites of Hizballah - politics suddenly taking a backseat to deeper feelings of loyalty to the clan and sect and unity against the outsider. "We are believers in peace and co-existence, but we will not accept any aggression against us," said Shawki Zeidan, a veteran Druze militia commander who led some 300 fighters against Hizballah on a 6,000-foot...