Word: sunni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last fall after spending the best part of five years covering Iraq. Unlike the bus driver, I was far from sanguine about the surge; I had seen too many military plans promise much and deliver little. But by the end of the year, Hammadi's optimism was looking prescient. Sunni insurgents I had known for years--men who had sworn blood oaths to fight the "occupier" until their dying breath--were joining forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. The vehemently anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had agreed to a cease-fire with...
...play the victim card, arguing that Maliki and the Americans had attacked him and his loyalists, even while allowing the militias of his Shi'ite rivals to prosper - as well as the U.S.-paid Sunni militias that are now being integrated into the Iraqi police and army. He can reasonably argue that he is the one true Iraqi patriot, the Iraqi leader the Americans fear most. How else to explain the attack on his Mahdi Army while he was observing a unilateral cease-fire? Furthermore, like Hizballah in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion in 2006, the Mahdi Army can claim...
...leaders to discuss the new cease-fire was that more of his forces be released under the amnesty law. This was to appease his disgruntled followers whose brothers and uncles are the ones behind bars and who feel they have taken an unfair brunt of the surge while former Sunni insurgents are getting paychecks in the Concerned Local Citizens units. Like any good politician, he has to prove he can deliver the goods to his followers - even if he has to go to war for it. With reporting by Brian Bennett, Bobby Ghosh, Abigail Hauslohner and Mark Kukis
...military and rhetorical resistance, Maliki upped the ante as well. Saturday, during a televised meeting with tribal leaders in Basra, he accused enemy fighters in Basra of being "worse than al-Qaeda." It was an inflammatory and ironic statement, since the militia, in addition to its attacks on Sunni civilians and its criminal activities, has often defended Shi'ites from Sunni terrorists when the government proved powerless...
...Friday, in what has become a daily occurrence, rockets or mortars slammed into the Green Zone, the heavily fortified central Baghdad sector that houses U.S. diplomats and the Iraqi government. One of the attacks hit the compound of the Sunni politician Tariq al-Hashimi, one of Iraq's vice presidents. The New York Times reported that one of his security guards had been killed. U.S. Embassy staff have been instructed to limit the time they spend outdoors and to wear helmets, flak vests and eye protection when they leave hardened structures...