Word: sunni
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nationalist leaders of the insurgency who had been quietly negotiating with the U.S. and Iraqi government had made no secret of their animosity toward Zarqawi and the al-Qaeda agenda. The announcement, just a day before Zarqawi's death, that the new Iraqi government would release some 2,500 Sunnis imprisoned for assisting the insurgency suggests that rapprochement between the government and the Sunni nationalist element of the insurgency may be accelerating, which was bad news for Zarqawi...
...downplaying al-Maliki's tough talk. "The comments from Prime Minister al-Maliki are expected and understood," says a senior adviser to President Bush. Indeed, al-Maliki's remarks may have been intended less for the U.S. government than for members of his own. Haditha is in the restive, Sunni-dominated Anbar province, and al-Maliki needs the support of Sunni politicians just to keep his government functioning. Ayad Jamaluddin, a secular member of Parliament, says al-Maliki's task is "to pilot a plane in which every single passenger has a different destination...
...Maliki, 56, is an unlikely unifier. In his previous job as spokesman for al-Jaafari's Islamic Dawa Party, he was known as a Shi'ite partisan. But he gained the trust of some Sunni politicians during last year's tortured negotiations over Iraq's constitution, when he was one of several politicians who helped cobble together a temporary compromise with Sunni and Kurdish groups...
Certainly in recent months, most of the violence has been Iraqi-on-Iraqi, with civilians being killed by Shi'ite death squads or Sunni insurgents and jihadis. U.S. forces often find themselves trying to prevent Iraqis from killing one another. On the same day that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that the government would launch an investigation into the 24 Haditha killings and called U.S. attacks against Iraqi civilians "a regular occurrence," at least 18 Iraqis died at the hands of their countrymen. The rate of sectarian killings has escalated sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing...
...murder civilians. After all, that's how their own soldiers behaved for decades. They expected no different from the Americans, so there was a built-in propensity to believe that many, or most, Iraqis killed by U.S. forces were innocent victims of oppression. That is especially true in the Sunni triangle, but many Shi'ites believe it too, especially those who follow the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Abu Ghraib scandal merely confirmed what they had suspected all along, that George Bush's soldiers were no different from Saddam's. Haditha was simply more of the same...