Word: sunniness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...year-old Nasheed says he is determined to secure liberal democracy in the Maldives. He sees the dissident struggle he helped wage in the Maldives, an orthodox Sunni nation, as a lightning rod for change in the Muslim world. But there are more pressing challenges at home. The Maldives boasts South Asia's highest GDP per capita, but the figure is inflated by the country's significant tourism revenues, which do not trickle down to everyone. Some 40% of the Maldives' population still earns less than $2 a day. And Maldivian youth are in the middle of a drug epidemic...
...Sunni parliamentarian Salim al-Jubouri took Muqtada al-Sadr's recent appearance in Turkey as a good sign. Sadr surfaced in Ankara ostensibly to discuss the situation in Iraq with top Turkish leaders, including President President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is a predominantly Sunni country, many observers noted, and maybe the militant Shi'ite warlord was making a show of nascent sectarian reconciliation. "The attitude is good," says al-Jubouri, a member of the Sunni political bloc known in Arabic as Tawafiq. "But so far it's all talk, we need to see actions...
...regime rooted in the loyalty he has cultivated in the security and intelligence services. But his electoral power base remains rooted in the Shi'ite majority, and he has largely declined to implement the U.S. benchmarks for national reconciliation deemed essential for ending the civil war by strengthening the Sunni political stake in Baghdad. The oil law governing distribution of revenues has not been passed, nor have restrictions been significantly eased on former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist organization (the party remains popular among Sunnis) serving in government. Most alarming, perhaps, has been Maliki's departure from...
...grisly find was one of six recently uncovered mass graves cited in the newest U.N. human-rights report on Iraq. The five others were found in areas controlled by Sunni insurgents during the peak periods of violence in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, meaning the killers likely had no connection to the Iraqi government. But the grave in Ur was almost certainly the work of killers associated with the Shi'ite Mahdi Army militia, which was supported by elements of the Iraqi security forces. (See a multimedia presentation of emergency-room work amid the 2007 fighting...
Even those who oppose all forms of harsh interrogation are not convinced that the Army manual is adequate. Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator in Iraq, says he found "police interrogation techniques much more appropriate" when questioning al-Qaeda operatives and Sunni insurgents. Alexander, who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, is the author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. His interrogations led to the location and killing of Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi...