Word: sunni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...turned very quickly into full- scale fighting." And then to extricate its own troops the U.S. would have become involved in deciding who should govern Iraq, a treacherous choice in the best of times. Organizing a government that could keep the country together among rival Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunni Muslims would have presented as formidable a task as all those doomed attempts, starting in 1963 and continuing for a decade or so, to devise a Vietnamese government that could win popular support...
...Sunni Muslims, for example in Basra, were joining in the rebellions against Hussein. As Arabs with historic enmity to Persians, the Iraqi Shiites would not have embraced Iran's theocracy. In any case, they deserve the same chance to escape slaughter which the American liberation gave many Kuwaitis. Their lack of oil, an embassy in Washington, and Saudi support does not make their deaths more palatable...
...country. "There are no real groups competing for power," says a U.S. analyst. "The Baathists have destroyed them all." . Bush's advisers fear that if some loose combination of rebels won, they would not be able to exercise effective control over the institutions dominated by Saddam's fellow Sunni Muslims -- the army, the security police and the Baath party -- that have kept Iraq together. The country could well splinter into rival fragments that might be gobbled up by neighboring Iran, Syria and Turkey, leading to instability throughout the Middle East. Or the rebels might provoke other multi-ethnic states...
...armed forces, which are dominated by Sunni Arabs, are also aware that both the Shi'ites and the Kurds are revolting not just against Saddam but against Sunni subjugation as well. Preserving Sunni predominance would thus require quashing the rebels' aspirations. For the Kurds, a capital and a fortune may yet prove as illusory as those slaves...
...plentiful then, and those who had previously felt themselves to be mere employees of a business called Kuwait Inc. banded together as a nation. "For the first time," says Ali Salem, a resistance leader, "all barriers were breached. Shi'ite Muslims, who have long been discriminated against by the Sunni majority, were major players, perhaps even the most significant. We were, at least for that time, truly...