Word: sunni
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Insurgents in Iraq are trying to send the same message. A recruitment video shown to TIME, in a Sunni mosque in Baghdad, suggests that resistance fighters are trying to line up Iraqis for suicide bombings, which U.S. officials have so far thought were mainly the work of foreign fighters. The video features testimonials from five "martyrs"; two speak with Saudi accents, says an interpreter who watched the video, but two others have Iraqi accents. One man, the video claims, bombed the Turkish embassy in Baghdad. Another is identified as a Kurd who bombed a CIA office in Arbil. The video...
Still, U.S. officials are worried that an election as early as this summer would give Iraq's Shi'ites, who make up 60% of the population but were repressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, a tremendous edge. With Saddam's Baathist structures gone, the Sunnis are disorganized and demoralized. Shi'ite religious institutions, by contrast, are strong. Among some in Washington, that raises the specter of a replay of the 1979 Iranian revolution, in which fundamentalist Shi'ite clerics took charge of the government, which proved hostile...
...which they're a minority; instead they want to expand it to take in the northern oil towns of Mosul and Kirkuk and expel the Arab population settled there by Saddam Hussein over the past two decades. A Kurdish statelet in the north is anathema to the Shiites and Sunni, and Turkey - which regards Kurdish self-determination as a mortal threat to its own naitonal security - has signaled that it would be prepared to invade to prevent such an outcome. Turkish prime minister Recip Erdogan left Washington last Wednesday plainly unconvinced by President Bush's assurances on the issue...
...substantially more democratic than Bremer's caucus plan. Sistani wants elections to ensure that the Shiites finally achieve political influence commensurate with their majority status. Ever since Iraq was first created in the mapping rooms of the British Foreign Office, its Shiites - and Kurds - have been ruled by the Sunni Arab minority. Coalition officials believe one of the factors fueling indigenous support for the insurgency is the Sunni minority's fear of losing its traditional privileges. Accommodating Sunni concerns, as well as the crypto-secessionist demands of the Kurds, is the major challenge facing Bremer's administration, now that...
...Bremer's problems are magnified by the binary nature of the conflicts he faces: Each move to accommodate Sistani is greeted with anger by the Sunni and Kurdish representatives on the IGC; each indication of a concession to Kurdish demands raises hackles among Shiite and Sunni leaders. Confronted by an increasingly complex array of political choices in Iraq, the Bush administration is reportedly divided over how best to proceed. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly favor dispensing with the caucus plan to hand over power directly to the Governing Council, expanding its Shiite representation...