Word: tribalized
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...Thursday, 32 tribal sheiks from the region - mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites - signed a groundbreaking accord pledging to work together to curb extremism and to shake the sectarian violence that has rent the region since the U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. The rare gathering at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel, in the heart of the Green Zone, was the culmination of months of delicate negotiations and a welcome breakthrough for U.S. troops who've been fighting and dying there for the past 14 months. "You know the saying: that all politics is local. Well you really...
...look at the graph [of attacks] after about April and it just falls. It's a free fall," said Maj. Austin Miller, head of the U.S. Army's civil affairs mission in the Mahmudiyah district. Military leaders credit the recent lull in violence to Sunni tribal leaders who earlier this year turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in response to its excesses. It dovetails with a movement that began a year ago in neighboring Anbar Province to the west and has since spread out from there along tribal lines...
...Tribal leaders approached the soldiers, who in turn notified civilian leaders, including the local Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, a State Department-sponsored unit of development and security experts working in the region since early this year. The EPRT turned to the U.S. Institute for Peace, a body created by Congress in the 1990s, to assemble the tribes, local Iraqi Army and local political leaders into working groups to come up with a plan. A delegation even traveled to Amman, Jordan, to convince exiled former members of the ousted Ba'ath regime...
...took nearly three hours to cover 100 meters. Once on the streets, her passage was slowed even further by dancing, cheering crowds shouting "Long live Bhutto!" and "Welcome home, Benazir!" The cheers turned to screams as the panicked crowd fled in all directions. Al-Qaeda-linked militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan had threatened to kill Bhutto upon her arrival, and intelligence agencies warned of several militant groups plotting terror attacks in the city...
With that decline in popularity has come a surge in Islamic militancy that Musharraf's army has been unable to combat. As many as 250 people, including some 45 soldiers, were killed in fierce fighting in Pakistan's tribal areas last week. Despite promises to the contrary, Musharraf was forced to use aircraft to bomb suspected militant hideouts, escalating the death toll and local anti-government rage. Some analysts are already calling the situation in North and South Waziristan, the locus of the fighting, a "civil war." On Friday, the eighth anniversary of Musharraf's coup, militants publicly beheaded...