Word: sunnis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When we hear talk about incipient civil war in Iraq, the fear is of an escalation of the current insurgency into a much bigger war. Analysts may have in mind something like the U.S. Civil War, with Sunni and Shi'ite armies fighting each other across well-defined fronts. Or they may imagine a sudden spasm of massive communal conflict and ethnic cleansing along the lines of Bosnia or Rwanda. Neither scenario is all that likely, although bouts of violent ethnic cleansing are certainly possible in a few parts of the country, especially Kirkuk...
...look at the ethnic conflicts and street demonstrations during Iraq's modern history, it is remarkable how few have involved Shi'ites fighting Sunnis. During the colonial era, Iraqis were united by their opposition to the British occupation. Sunni and Shi'ite tribes cooperated in rebelling against British rule, and were only put down with a bombing campaign in 1920 that killed 9,000. In 1941 mobs targeted Iraq's small Jewish population; Jews had been a valued part of the Iraqi national fabric but were accused, unfairly, of being pro-colonial. After World War II, much of the violence...
Civil wars, as a general rule, don't announce themselves when they arrive. But how else to label what Iraqis witnessed in their streets last week? What other term could describe the sight of armed and angry Shi'ite mobs rampaging through Baghdad and other cities, dragging Sunnis into the streets and executing them, looting their homes and burning down their mosques? The proximate cause of the violence was the bombing of al-Askari, the sacred Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, but that attack could only partially account for the hatreds unleashed. A government-imposed curfew briefly interrupted the slaughter...
Such dire predictions have been made before and proved wrong. But this time Iraq got a very real, very frightening glimpse of what war with itself might look like. After three days of violence, more than 200 people were killed, and Sunni groups claimed at least 100 mosques were damaged. The extent of the carnage left many with the uneasy sense that the long-simmering hostility between the country's two main sects has at last boiled over--and that the fragile, feckless institutions of authority in Iraq have no means of holding the anger back. "This was the worst...
...even wider and more destabilizing war that would tempt the country's neighbors to intervene on behalf of the partisans. And the violence threatens to spoil the overriding U.S. objective in Iraq: brokering the formation of a broadly representative government, which the Bush Administration has hoped would defuse the Sunni-led insurgency and facilitate a substantial withdrawal of U.S. troops. To protest the other side's excesses, Sunni and Shi'ite leaders have both walked away from U.S.-led negotiations on the new government...