Word: sunniness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saif Abdallah says his inventions have helped kill or maim scores, possibly hundreds, of Americans. For more than four years, he has been developing remote-control devices that Sunni insurgents use to detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the roadside bombs that are the No. 1 killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The only time he ever felt a pang of regret was in the spring of 2006, when he heard that the Pentagon, in a bid to fight the growing IED menace, had roped in a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Abdallah, an electronics engineer...
...death from such dreck, turning an old toy walkie-talkie into a trigger for an explosion 100 yards away or programming a washing-machine timer to set off an IED two hours later. Such capacity for destruction makes him invaluable to the disparate groups that make up the Sunni insurgency, including al-Qaeda. "In our circle, everyone has heard of him," says the commander of one rebel group, al-Nasr Salahdin...
...seem especially worried that a massive U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown had been under way in Baghdad for the past four months - and that one of its aims was to break the back of the IED industry and roll up people like him. (Abdallah was introduced to TIME through Sunni insurgent contacts, but he did not provide his real name or reveal where he lives.) Iraqi and American officials say they have shut down dozens of bomb factories, arrested nearly 18,000 insurgents and killed more than 3,000 others. But the only metric that matters to Abdallah is the number...
...According to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution at the end of May, the number of sectarian murders, carried out mainly by Shi'ite death squads against Sunnis, has risen noticeably in recent weeks after a drop-off that began in the latter part of February. Sectarian deaths are often described as "extra-judicial killings" (EJKs) and involve the abduction, torture and murder of the victim, with the body usually left on the street. In May, says the Brookings report, citing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, there were roughly 700 EJKs across Baghdad. While still lower than...
From the beginning, however, the surge strategy relied heavily on the idea that the increased presence of U.S. forces would deter sectarian violence. That worked, for a time. The Mahdi Army, the largest Shi'ite militia, tacitly agreed to suspend its campaign of murder and intimidation against Sunnis as the surge got rolling in March and April. For two months, Shi'ite death squads largely checked themselves, even while Sunni extremists pressed a campaign of bombings that left 617 Iraqis dead in March and 634 dead in April. (In May, the fatalities from bombings fell...