Word: sunni
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Easy Targets IRAQ Defying the continuing U.S. military crackdown on insurgents within Iraq's Sunni triangle, suicide bombers struck simultaneously at two Iraqi police stations in towns north of Baghdad Saturday, killing at least 18 and injuring dozens more. In a separate attack, a civilian cargo plane made an emergency landing at Baghdad International Airport after apparently being struck by a surface-to-air missile, the first plane to be hit since major combat operations ended in May. The weekend's assaults came a day after guerrillas co-ordinated a series of attacks in Baghdad using rockets mounted on donkey...
...British officials are warning that defeating the insurgency requires more than a military response, and that more has to be done to accommodate the political aspirations of the Sunni community, in which the guerrillas have found succor and support. Despite comprising only 15 percent of the population, Sunnis are accustomed to a dominant role in the country's political and technocratic elite, and that role has come under threat with the prospect of a more democratic political order. Their influence has already been eroded by U.S. edicts barring senior Baathists from key positions, and dissolving the Iraqi military whose officer...
...upward of 60 coalition troops killed within the past two weeks alone. No military force is going to absorb upward of 30 attacks a day week after week without hitting back hard in order to reassert its deterrent capability. The problem facing U.S. troops in Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, however, is that the enemy is largely invisible, and unless the civilian population is willing to blow the whistle, he's notoriously hard to find. (Just ask the Israelis. Or the Russians who served in Afghanistan. Or any Vietnam vet.) And as Milt Bearden, former CIA liaison to the Afghan...
...commander who has attracted attention is Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, a Sunni Muslim who was Saddam?s Minister of Defense, an Arab businessman in close touch with the U.S. government tells TIME. Though Hashim was on the U.S.'s most-wanted list, this source says he was in contact with the U.S. before the war and was consulted by American officials after he was taken into custody in Mosul. A former CIA official says Hashim is "a great guy, basically an officer?s officer." He adds that Hashim would "bring a real sense of empowerment" to Iraqis who never...
...leaders, each with his own distinct agenda. The IGC's problems, however, are not simply rooted in its cumbersome structure. They reflect an absence of consensus among Iraqis over a post-Saddam order. The Kurds favor a federation that would give them maximum autonomy in northern Iraq, but the Sunnis and Shiites are reluctant to see the country divided. The Sunnis, who make up much of Iraq's technocratic elite, are accustomed to power and privilege way beyond their proportion of the population (some 15 percent), and want maximum protection of their position. But the Shiites seek a democracy that...