Word: sunni
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...Dubai. But Zovko, friends say, still yearned for adventure and the chance to make a difference in the world. As an employee of Blackwater USA, a private company hired by the Pentagon to provide security for nonmilitary personnel in Iraq, Zovko recently returned to a war zone: Iraq's Sunni triangle, home to Saddam Hussein loyalists and those who do their killing. Fallujah, a city of about 300,000, is the hotbed of this bandit country, and it was there that Zovko, 32, was passing through with three colleagues on the morning of March 31. Like Zovko, all the others...
...killing small numbers of soldiers with "standoff" weapons like roadside bombs--are no match for U.S. firepower. "Look," says a Pentagon official, "Fallujah is a problem right now, but we'll deal with it." In recent months U.S. forces have claimed some success in subduing resistance in other Sunni-triangle hot spots. That includes Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, where the military responded to attacks by demolishing homes and cordoning off the entire city with barbed wire. The military has avoided such blunt tactics in Fallujah, a town 35 miles west of Baghdad that has long been prone to unrest...
...decision to suspend offensive action in order to allow what Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt called "the political track and the discussion track to go forward" speaks volumes about the nature of the problem confronting the U.S. in Fallujah and elsewhere. U.S. officials have tended to characterize the Sunni insurgency as the work of Baathist "bitter-enders" and expatriate terrorists - not the sort of folks with whom the U.S. maintains a "discussion track." But the reality of Fallujah is plainly a lot messier: Brig.-Gen. Kimmitt insists the Iraqis killed there are almost all insurgents, but local hospital sources insist most...
...Baghdad have also provoked widespread outrage in Iraq's majority ethnic community. The two-front insurrection and the tough response by the U.S. has even had an ironic nation-building effect, as the plight of the besieged city has become an anti-American rallying point across Iraq's traditional Sunni-Shiite divide. Thousands of impoverished Shiites in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood have stepped forward to donate blood and food supplies for Fallujah's defenders, while portraits of the Shiite firebrand Sadr have been carried by protestors in towns throughout the Sunni Triangle. Even some of the key U.S. allies...
...Although Rice's testimony produced no bombshells, there were plenty exploding in Iraq even as she spoke. The uprising among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis that has shaken Coalition forces there and thrown U.S. transition plans into crisis may be a more immediate concern on the minds of the American electorate than the increasingly partisan post-mortem over 9/11...