Word: sunni
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...While there has been no claim of responsibility, suspicions immediately fell on al Qaeda in Iraq, and their Sunni allies in the insurgency. Shi?ite reactions were swift and violent. Mobs from the predominantly Shi'ite Shu'lah neighborhood in western Baghdad attacked Sunni mosques in Ghazaliya, a nearby Sunni area. Gunmen were out on the streets of Sadr City, home base for rebel cleric-and parliamentary power broker-Moqtada al-Sadr. In Basra, there were reports of heavy street fighting between Sunni and Shi'ite gunmen. Elsewhere, Sunni political party offices were attacked...
...process of forming a broad-based new government. Since the main Shi?ite coalition in Parliament renominated the widely disliked Ibrahim al-Jaafari for the position of prime minister, the U.S. has been edging away from its Shi?ite allies in the government and lining up with secular parties, Sunnis and Kurds, all in an effort to bring more Sunnis into the cabinet. This is the key part of their plan to undermine the Sunni insurgency and begin the withdrawal of American troops...
...something to do with the absence of carnage in Karbala. Last summer al-Zarqawi apparently received a letter-later released by the U.S. government-from the al-Qaeda leadership ordering him to stop bombing Islamic innocents. Recently al-Zarqawi's terrorists seem to have found a new preoccupation: assassinating Sunni leaders who are planning to participate in the new Iraqi government. They killed prominent Sunnis in Kirkuk and Fallujah last week. Those may be signs of desperation, signs that al-Zarqawi fears that an all-inclusive deal is possible, bringing Sunnis more prominently into the new Iraqi government and defanging...
...threat of a resurgent Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and its crude new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has concentrated the minds of both Western diplomats and Middle Eastern Sunni governments. Suddenly the prospect of a permanent Iraqi government dominated by Iran-friendly religious Shi'ites seems a more pressing problem. "If the negotiations in Iraq do not yield a government acceptable to Sunnis," the Middle Eastern diplomat told me, "we could be looking at a civil war that becomes a regional conflict...
...Zarqawi's men, though, have shown few signs of backing down. In Latifiya last week, al-Qaeda fighters captured and murdered five members of the nationalist Islamic Army in Iraq and assassinated a Sunni colonel. After the backlash in Ramadi, al-Zarqawi's men supposedly retreated into the rocky western deserts but have continued to target local leaders. A senior security officer says jihadist fighters followed a Ramadi chieftain from the powerful Dulaimi tribe into Baghdad on Wednesday; handcuffed him, a nephew and a senior security officer for the western provinces; and executed each of them with a bullet through...