Word: sunni
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...violence raged in several Sunni towns west of Baghdad on April 8, Mohammed Rifat steered his green Jeep Cherokee out of the gates of Abu Ghraib prison, where he worked as a construction foreman for a Kellogg Brown & Root subcontractor. Rifat, 41, who returned to Iraq in February after 24 years in Toronto, was heading home to care for his aging mother. He never made it. Somewhere in the night, his family believes, kidnappers stopped his vehicle and spirited him away. This is everyone's worst nightmare in the new Iraq. A bewildering variety of groups--some seeking money, some...
...past year, 35 have been freed, most in the first days after capture. In Rifat's case, the top Canadian representative in Baghdad could offer little help, so Rifat's brother-in-law Abdullah al-Khazraji has taken charge. Venturing almost daily into the netherworld of Fallujah, the restive Sunni city where many of the hostages end up, al-Khazraji has met an assortment of shadowy informants. Some claim to know Rifat's whereabouts; others say they can deliver him for cash. "I feel like I'm hanging by a thread in this web," says al-Khazraji...
...inaugural words: "I say that we will hunt them down to give them their just punishment." But many Iraqis regard this second appointed regime as just another set of American puppets. "Nothing has changed," says Harith al-Dhari, head of the Association of Muslim Scholars and a Sunni sheik who some U.S. officials say is linked to insurgents. "This is a government created by the U.S. that cannot exist without the U.S. They cannot make any difference." The only solution, he says, "is to get rid of the Americans." There are currently 138,000 U.S. troops and some...
...Salafi imam recently released from Abu Ghraib prison and now based in Baghdad's radical Ibn Taimiya Mosque. Mujahedin leaders and U.S. military and intelligence officers in Iraq say many jihadists are also rallying behind Harith al-Dhari, who leads the Association of Muslim Scholars, Iraq's most significant Sunni organization. Al-Dhari, who operates out of the Mother of all Battles Mosque, is said to have played a key role in mobilizing fighters during April's uprising in Fallujah; during a gathering of militants there on April 9, one of his lieutenants called on Muslims outside Iraq to join...
...Challenge: Establish independence from the U.S. in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis and the region; isolate the Sunni insurgents by giving as many former Baathist types as possible a stake in the new Iraq, and send them after the foreign jihadists; draw the skeptical Shi'ites closer by going all-out to organize elections and make sure that Moqtada Sadr's group is participating; keep the Kurds on board; develop a common understanding between Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the terms of a new Iraqi political arrangement. A tall order, to be sure, but the alternatives...