Word: sunnis
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...York Times written by two military analysts from the "liberal" Brookings Institution. They had just returned from a brief tour of Iraq where they saw many of the same things I saw on a similar trip in June. They saw the success our military has had in turning Sunni tribes against extremists from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) but then extrapolated wildly, saying this was a war we "just might win." Predictably, this had the impact of crack cocaine on neoconservatives, producing a euphoric and slightly violent high. The conservative Weekly Standard scurrilously announced that it had helped dash...
Crocker and Iraq watchers in Washington seem to be pinning much on political talks in Baghdad, where Maliki has been huddling with key leadership figures from the country's factions in recent days. Last week Maliki, following the refusal of key Sunni leaders to resume participation in the government, called an emergency political summit. Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, one of the last prominent Sunni figures willing to be seen talking to the Shi'ite Maliki, was summoned. So was Kurdish President Jalal Talabani and Shi'ite Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi as well as Massoud Barzani, president...
Days of closed-door meetings have ensued and are expected to continue through the week, perhaps longer. At bottom the issue is Maliki's inability thus far to forge a compromise with Sunni factions, who accuse Maliki, with good reason, of pursuing a sectarian agenda. But the prospects for success of the talks are dim. No signs of compromise have emerged despite days of meetings. And if Maliki's government remains shunned by Sunni leadership when the talks finally end, the political reconciliation the surge was meant to spur will have gone backward, not forward...
...Yazidis have their own extremists: earlier this year, members of the community stoned to death a young woman they accused of converting to Sunni Islam to marry her lover. A widely distributed video of the stoning inflamed Sunni sentiments; in retaliation, insurgents executed 23 Yazidi factory workers near Mosul. With reporting by Andrew Lee Butters
...disregard is pretty much exactly what they have come to expect from their politicians. Some of the most prominent Iraqi politicians spend little time in the country, much less in parliament. Egregious absenteeism cuts across sectarian and ethnic lines: perennial no-shows include Shi'ite elder Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Sunni leader Saleh Mutlak and secular stalwarts Iyad Allawi and Adnan Pachachi. (Al-Jaafari and Allawi, both former Prime Ministers, are trying to unseat the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki.) "There's no point in going to parliament," Allawi told TIME recently. "Nothing important is done there anyway...