Word: sunni
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...Thursday, 32 tribal sheiks from the region - mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites - signed a groundbreaking accord pledging to work together to curb extremism and to shake the sectarian violence that has rent the region since the U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. The rare gathering at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel, in the heart of the Green Zone, was the culmination of months of delicate negotiations and a welcome breakthrough for U.S. troops who've been fighting and dying there for the past 14 months. "You know the saying: that all politics is local. Well you really...
...political district of Mahmudiyah lies just south of metropolitan Baghdad and includes the violent urban centers of Yusifiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. It shares a rough-and-tumble neighborhood with Anbar to the west and Babil to the south. A mixed region of Shi'a and Sunni, city and country, the mostly agricultural region suffers all the sectarian, economic and political woes of the capital. While the region's Sunni and Shi'ite tribes battled each other for land and primacy, they found a common enemy in the U.S. troops stationed there. But that situation changed about four months...
...look at the graph [of attacks] after about April and it just falls. It's a free fall," said Maj. Austin Miller, head of the U.S. Army's civil affairs mission in the Mahmudiyah district. Military leaders credit the recent lull in violence to Sunni tribal leaders who earlier this year turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in response to its excesses. It dovetails with a movement that began a year ago in neighboring Anbar Province to the west and has since spread out from there along tribal lines...
...vicious free-for-all in the growing civil war among the Shi'a. While none of the recent fighting can be directly linked to any outside group, local security officials say that they can now add to the list of troublemakers elements of al-Qaeda and other Sunni Arab fighters, who appear to be taking advantage of the chaos to regain a toehold in the region and accelerate the flow of Shi'a blood...
Diwaniyah's Iraqi security chief, Sheik Hussein Hadi al Buderi, said at least 50 "Afghans," local slang for Iraqi or foreign Sunni militants trained abroad for jihad, have recently "penetrated" the town. "Yes," he said, "there is a presence of al-Qaeda now in Diwaniyah...