Word: sunni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...past month, the government, which is Sunni-dominated, has stepped up its military offensive against Shi'ite rebels, known as Houthis, whom officials blame for the killings. It's a continuation of a war that began in 2004, when the government killed a Houthi leader, raising fears among Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam that they were being targeted for eradication by the government and Sunni extremists. So far, thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced by the fighting, mostly in the northern province of Saada. The government has used aerial bombardment...
...will be carefully courted as potential kingmaker when the votes are cast and a new government is formed. Iraq's Kurds put forward a mostly united front in their rocky relations with the central government in Baghdad over autonomy, oil sharing, and disputed territories, issues that pit it against Sunni Arabs in the northwest and most Iraqi nationalists...
...front for negotiations. The Syrians, who always seem almost-ready to make peace, seem less almost-ready than they did a few months ago. The other Arab states in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, have refused to provide diplomatic incentives to nudge the Israelis toward peace, even though a Sunni-Israeli alliance seems the most rational way to confront the Iranian nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the Iranian leadership, stung by the embarrassment of the rigged elections and the regime's subsequent violence against its own people, seems unlikely to concede very much when formal talks begin about Iran's potential weaponization...
...turbaned jihadi. "The Americans said 'No way. We don't deal with terrorists,' and they excluded the leadership," one senior Afghan official explained to TIME. One tactic that worked well in Iraq has not been used in Afghanistan. The U.S. forces in Mesopotamia were able to buy off the Sunni insurgency there by offering a monthly wage of $300 for each of 90,000 fighters. No such incentive has been offered to the Taliban...
...Pakistan should it side with Tehran's enemies. Already struggling with a militant campaign that has ravaged the northwest and the tribal areas and terrorized major cities, Pakistan, analysts say, can ill-afford a revival of sectarian violence that plagued the country during the 1980s, when Saudi-backed Sunni militant groups clashed with Iranian-backed Shi'ite ones as part of a regional proxy war. Says Ayesha Siddiqa, an independent security analyst: "It isn't just Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan where Iran can create trouble if it wants...