Word: sunni
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...While administration officials debate exit strategies, U.S. forces in Iraq are taking the fight to an enemy often difficult to find. Last weekend, a new get-tough policy saw U.S. air strikes in the Sunni Triangle following the downing of a third U.S. helicopter in two weeks. The show of force is designed to deter the locals who have either supported the insurgents or, at least, failed to cooperate with the U.S. forces to weed them out. One obvious danger is that large-scale counterinsurgency operations tend to alienate the local population, and generate support for the insurgency. A second...
Iraq is a country where lawlessness comes in many forms. At its most lethal it is the car bombs in Baghdad, the ambushes of U.S. troops around Fallujah, the shootings in Tikrit. But outside the deadly Sunni triangle, the absence of law has produced a chaotic sense of freedom that leaves Iraqis both exhilarated and terrified. To get a clearer picture of conditions in the entirety of Iraq--particularly in the north and south, which have received less media attention--TIME teamed up with ABC News to travel the length of the country, visiting more than 30 towns and conducting...
...Infantry Division, last week said the accuracy of information the U.S. was receiving was up over the past few months from 45% to 90%. But that's not Alpha Company's experience. Its intelligence officers say the enemy has become more elusive and shadowy, especially in the dangerous Sunni triangle around Baghdad, where locals are especially reluctant to help the U.S. "Most of the stuff we go out to find turns out to be dry holes," says Private First Class Mike Sifter. "We're told there's a bomb somewhere, and all we find is one machine-gun magazine...
...into the factional politics of post-Saddam Iraq. Some members of the Iraqi Governing Council have suggested, for example, that the U.S. ought to resurrect the Iraqi regular army, which they argue should never have been disbanded. Others in the IGC, however, see the old army as dominated by Sunni officers, and some of the Kurd and Shiite parties want a greater role for their own militias. Political power in the old Iraq issued from the barrel of a gun, and the contenders for power in the new Iraq are in no rush to prematurely turn theirs into plowshares...
...talking of accelerating the process by which Iraqis adopt a new constitution and elect a government. But constitution-making is a deeply contentious business in Iraq, which has, pretty much since it was constituted as a nation-state by the British after World War I, been ruled by the Sunni minority. The Shiite majority, naturally, insist on nothing short of a majoritarian democracy, while the Kurds demand the right to govern northern Iraq as an autonomous component of an Iraqi federation (the consternation of neighboring Turkey). Right now there's substantial disagreement over how a constitution should be adopted...