Word: sunni
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...rebels dedicated to toppling the regime in Tehran; it had been confined to a single base outside Baghdad and was monitored by the U.S. Nobody had accused the Mujahedin-e-Khalq of any atrocities on Iraqi soil, and al-Maliki's decision to evict the group smacked of tokenism. Sunni politicians seized on the eviction as proof that al-Maliki was doing Tehran's bidding...
...Sunnis in Baghdad, the sight of policemen is cause for concern rather than reassurance. Traffic checkpoints are especially perilous. Recently three TIME staff members--brothers, all Sunni--were detained at a police checkpoint for five hours. They began to worry when a Shi'ite friend who had been riding with them was allowed to leave. When the men showed their media badges, issued by the U.S. military, the cops accused them of being American spies. "We'll send you to the Interior Ministry," a cop said, obviously enjoying their discomfort as he bundled them into the back of a pickup...
Almost every Sunni family I meet seems to have a horror story that starts with a policeman at a checkpoint asking for identification. It's profiling, Iraqi style. The harassment ranges from getting insulting, sniggering comments ("Nice car. Where did you steal it?") to being handcuffed, blindfolded and hauled off to prison or, worse, a torture chamber. The most vulnerable are those who have obviously Sunni names, such as Omar. I have interviewed more than a dozen Omars, including two of Mahmud's nephews, who have endured varying degrees of persecution from police or militias. As a precaution, many Sunnis...
...disarming Sadr's army may prove, if anything, even more difficult than disarming Hizballah in Lebanon. That's because the three-year campaign of terror against Shi'ite civilians by Sunni insurgents has led the community to see its militias, rather than the central government, as its only protection. As that violence escalates, the likelihood diminishes that these communities will support any effort to forcefully dismantle the militias. Nor can an agreement to disarm be easily orchestrated by removing the insurgent threat, since the branch of the insurgency responsible for targeting the Shi'ites is led by al-Qaeda...
...openly hostile to the Coalition may be entirely implausible. Indeed, the key to disarming those militias is more likely to lie in a new political agreement with their party bosses, in conjunction with a wider national-unity power-sharing agreement capable of shrinking the base of the Sunni insurgency. But the mounting sectarian violence and the passions stoked by Lebanon make the prospects for such a deal right now more remote than ever...