Word: sunniness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Despite this week's carnage the absolute number of bombings is still far lower than it was one year ago. The problem, however, is not simply lives lost, but also what the slow increase in attacks says about the resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. Battered by Shi'ite militias, the U.S. military and the defection of more moderate insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other radical insurgent groups are much weaker now than they were just last summer. But, as U.S. officials are quick to acknowledge, they still have the men, the money and the organization to pose a serious...
...kept under control. American troop levels in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq will return this year to about the same level as 2006 - the year that saw the worst of the country's sectarian violence. Helping to fill that void, supposedly, will be former members of the Sunni insurgency: thousands have become U.S.-paid counter-insurgents and, in some cases, members of the Iraqi government security forces. Unlike the mostly Shi'ite Iraqi army and police, these Sunnis have credibility in their towns and neighborhoods and have proven effective in fighting their former insurgent allies...
...state visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and struck a neighborhood that is home to Iraq's largest Shi'ite political party and many Shi'ite government officials. The timing and location of this bombing may have been a coincidence, but Karrada makes a nice target for Sunni militants who frame their fight as a struggle against Iranian domination...
...long-term difficulty for the United States and the Iraqi government is that this suspicion of Iran is not simply a fantasy of radical Sunni insurgents. It is a very real fear of Sunni former insurgents currently cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda. Former insurgent leaders routinely scorn the Iraqi government's intentions, casting it as a pawn of the Iranians. So, as the Iraqi government strives to reduce violence by improving its relationship with Iran, it may be setting the stage for continued conflict with disaffected Sunnis...
...slower to take hold in Mosul for a number of factors. Mosul drew a measure of stability from its history as place of relative wealth and sophistication, whereas early insurgent havens like Fallujah and Ramadi were poor, troubled places even under Saddam Hussein. And some leaders among Mosul's Sunni community for a time held out hope of finding a role in the emerging post-invasion power structures even when Sunnis elsewhere were quickly adopting a rejectionist mentality. General David Petraeus, who was then head of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, says Mosul's first real plunge into violence came...