Word: sunni
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...even as they began rolling into Fallujah a week ago, U.S. field commanders warned that hundreds of the insurgents had already slipped away, having known for months that a frontal assault was coming. These insurgents, and others located elsewhere throughout the Sunni areas in Baghdad and to the north responded to the Fallujah offensive by taking to the streets of cities from the capital all the way up to Mosul, emerging from the shadows in groups numbering up to 50 fighters at a time to brazenly confront U.S. and Iraqi government forces in broad daylight. Within a day of pronouncing...
...frontline around Fallujah, and the disappointment expressed by the U.S. commander at Mosul over the fact that most of the Iraqi police in the city had simply fled their stations when attacked by insurgents are a sobering reality-check on hopes for deploying Iraqi forces around the Sunni triangle as the day-to-day mainstay against the insurgency. Maintaining security in the Sunni areas ahead of the planned January election may still require far more extensive garrison deployments of U.S. troops, which stretches their resources and leaves them more vulnerable to insurgent attacks...
...offensive in Mosul has followed so hard on the heels of Fallujah suggests U.S. commanders are determined to keep the guerrillas on the back foot and prevent the emergence of any new sanctuaries in which they're allowed to operate unmolested. Battles are likely to rage throughout the mostly Sunni areas for weeks and even months ahead as the U.S. and its allies seek to create a climate facilitating elections, while the insurgents aim to sabotage their efforts...
...primary strategic purpose of recapturing Fallujah, however, was to facilitate Sunni participation in the January election, and more generally in the post-Saddam order authored by the U.S. And while the military operation, if followed by a substantial troop presence in the city, may facilitate the opening of polling stations in Fallujah, that fact alone may not be enough to encourage Sunni voters to turn out. Indeed, the operation in Fallujah strengthened calls to boycott the election by the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organization influential among Sunni clerics, and prompted the main Sunni political party to withdraw from...
...channels showed Americans, rather than Iraqis in charge on the ground, for example when an Iraqi Red Crescent relief convoy was turned away - to the alarm even of some Iraqi national guard commanders. Nor will the government's case be helped by the spectacle of U.S. troops arresting leading Sunni clerics and politicians sympathetic to the insurgency in Baghdad, or the widely televised image of a Marine apparently shooting dead an unarmed insurgent inside a mosque. Nor will the images of death and destruction that emerge from the ruined city help bolster the government?s case, even though...