Word: sunni
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...diversity. Even the most homogeneous of the big blocs pretend to be more diverse than they really are. For example, the Shi'ite Islamist bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, which critics suspect would like to spin off oil-rich Shi'ite southern Iraq into an autonomous region, includes one Sunni party from Anbar province. When asked, many average Iraqis say sectarian violence was something forced on them by outsiders, a bad dream from which they've now awoken. (See pictures of Iraq's revival...
...thousands of people are still missing. Meanwhile, many of the men and parties responsible for war crimes hold positions of power and are untouchable. "The government tries to stop prosecutions every step of the way, because its hands are dirty too," says Daha Arwai, the head of a Sunni charity that looks after the children and widows of men murdered by sectarian militias. "Ordinary Iraqis now realize that sectarianism was something that was pushed on them by politicians. But ordinary Iraqis have nothing. Power is in the hands of the politicians. And if it suits their goals, they will bring...
...withdraw its soldiers from Iraq later in the year, Iraqis could revert to settling their political disputes in the streets. "The problem is the police," he says. "The police are all local, so the local parties can manipulate them." For now, though, al-Mahdwe, who belongs to a Sunni party that opposes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led governing coalition, is more worried about an élite counterterrorism unit run by Maliki's office, which he accuses of arresting scores of opposition politicians and government critics in Diyala. Two months ago, they took the deputy governor, Mohammad...
...local allies have certainly made massive security gains in Diyala. The al-Qaeda-inspired insurgent groups that once rampaged through the province have been reduced to a handful of criminal cells that attempt the occasional assassination, according to Sheik Hussam al-Mojjma, head of the local Awakening Council - the Sunni citizens brigade largely responsible for defeating al-Qaeda. "When we started fighting al-Qaeda [in 2007] it was just us and the Americans," he says. "Not the army, not the police." But he isn't happy about the way he and his men were treated by the Shi'ite-dominated...
...Council's 23,000 men were given jobs in the police and security forces, according to al-Mojjma. "It's all sectarian," says the sheik, whose headquarters are a concrete hut with no furniture on the eastern edge of Baquba. "The government doesn't trust us because we are Sunni. [But] if they push us any more, we are going to explode." He is particularly worried about what will happen once the U.S. pulls out of Iraq. "Iran will take us," he says. "Everyone in the region will try to occupy Iraq." But what makes the sheik even angrier...