Word: sunni
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...rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Several shells crashed into an Islamic orphanage housing hundreds of children. Some were handicapped, and many had lost both parents in previous waves of communal violence. "The children were terrified," an official said later. "They ran about crying and screaming." At one point the Sunni radio station, Voice of Arab Lebanon, broadcast an appeal to the combatants to stop fighting around the orphanage. Like other appeals for ceasefires that night, it went unheeded...
...Vice-Presidents in more than half a century; in Baghdad. Talabani, who spent years fighting the regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, becomes the first Kurdish president of an Arab-dominated country; Yawar is a tribal leader of the Sunni Muslim minority. The announcements, along with the naming of Shi'ite politician Ibrahim Jaafari, 58, as Prime Minister, followed nine weeks of deadlock in Iraq's parliament since the country's landmark elections...
...Tuesday's failed assembly session highlighted the fact that the Kurdish-Shiite negotiations are not the only sticking point. There had been broad agreement that the post of Assembly Speaker would go to a Sunni Arab as part of an effort to draw that community into the new polity, but when acting President Ghazi al-Yawer declined the post, legislators could not agree on an alternative. The mortar shells exploding outside the chamber may have served as a reminder that none of the Sunni elements in the Assembly right now can be deemed representative of a community that mostly stayed...
...answerable to the interim government. Washington retains no formal or open political role in Iraq, and the U.S. embassy there routinely insists, when asked by journalists, that it has no hand in the political process. That remains a wise posture, given the implacable hostility of both the Shiite and Sunni leadership to American tutelage. But given the depth of U.S. investment in lives and treasure in Iraq, it is widely assumed among Iraqis that the U.S. will seek to ensure the most favorable outcome by using its role as the guarantor of security, and the major underwriter of reconstruction...
...drafting of a new constitution. The relentless bloodletting of the insurgency continues, and most of its victims are Shiites and Kurds. Pressure for reprisals is growing despite the insistence by the Shiite and Kurdish leadership that their people resist the provocation intended by sectarian killing - after all, Sunnis already imagine themselves marginalized by the transition in Iraq, and any sectarian reprisals will only deepen Sunni support for the insurgency. A majority of Iraqis voted for the promise of change, choosing an alliance that promised peace, security, jobs, reconstruction and a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. So far, they're not seeing...