Word: sunniness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me-confirming reports from several other sources-that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack...
...rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war. "Just because the Sunni tribesmen have joined with us in Anbar doesn't mean they like the Baghdad government...
Much remains a mystery about Fatah al-Islam, the Palestinian-led Sunni Muslim fundamentalist faction that sprang up six months ago and is at the center of Lebanon's latest fighting. What is known, however, indicates that the group based near the northern coastal city of Tripoli is a product of past Middle East conflict, a manifestation of present unrest in Lebanon and an ominous sign of future turmoil throughout the region...
...fighters, which include Saudis, Syrians, Yemenis, Moroccans as well as Palestinians. Yet the bombardment of a Palestinian refugee camp risks broadening the conflict to include other mainstream Palestinian factions as well as Hizballah - which, though a Shi'ite group at odds with al-Qaeda, is nonetheless closely allied with Sunni Palestinian factions like Hamas. With Lebanon balanced on a knife-edge since Hariri's killing two years ago, many fear that unrest could cause the country to stumble backwards into the civil war that ravaged the country between 1975-90, itself ignited amid friction involving armed Palestinian groups...
...into the buildings, one soldier grumbled that when the troops first arrived on the scene some local residents has tried to hide the militants. "They have supporters here," he said. The government is vowing to finish Fatah al-Islam once and for all, but the struggle to contain rising Sunni extremist sentiment in Lebanon promises to be a long battle...