Word: sunni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Much as they want to see Saddam killed, overthrown or tried for war crimes, several top Bush Administration advisers and Arab leaders are quietly pulling for some of Saddam's nastiest henchmen to survive in power. If Iraq's Sunni Muslim ruling elite were to be ousted wholesale, no alternative government could easily take charge of the country's highly politicized military and secret police. Fear of these institutions is the strongest glue binding Iraq's fractious populace, including its long-oppressed Shi'ite Muslim majority and its rebellious northern Kurds. "When the Iraqis stop fighting us," says a senior...
...embargo against Baghdad in the run-up to the war, Iran last week announced openly that it would be sending food and medicine to Iraqi noncombatants, as is permitted under U.N. guidelines. Both countries have Shi'ite Muslim majorities, though the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein is dominated by Sunni Muslims. Tehran's ultimate goal, some analysts say, is to foment a takeover by Baghdad's Shi'ites. If the day ever comes that friendly Shi'ites do control Iraq, Iran might offer the new government a generous gift: say, 100 or so fighters and bombers confiscated during the gulf...
...which rule his country and Saddam's. Turkey has historical claims on Iraq's oil-rich Mosul province in the north. And Shi'ite-led Iran could easily justify a land snatch as a means of liberating the Shi'ite majority in Iraq, which is dominated by a Sunni minority. Should moves to sunder Iraq begin, the country's Kurdish minority might rise up to carve its own state out of the north. That, in turn, might spark a rebellion among Turkey's Kurds...
...Jeaan, a Muslim in the orthodox Sunni tradition, now worships alone. "I've felt a little intimidated because there are a lot of Palestinians and Jordanians who adamantly oppose Western intervention in Kuwait," he says. He finds strength from his ritual of praying five time each day. "I think anybody who isn't religious now has got to be crazy," he adds...
...these friends of Israel unaware of the manner in which Arab regimes deal with dissent and difference--whether non-Arab, like the Kurds in Iraq (more poison gas), or Arab, like the Sunni Muslims in Homs, Syria (was it 30,000 dead or 40,000?) and the people of Kuwait. And they quite reasonably draw the inference that if the Arabs are ready to treat their own that way, how much worse would they do to the enemy Jews, whom they define to one another (though no longer for sensitive Western ears and eyes) as intruders to be driven into...