Word: baathists
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...that nearly got me and my friend's father). Substantial attacks, at nearly a once-a-month rate, can be traced back to August 2009, when two truck bombs hit the finance and foreign ministries and killed 101 people. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and elements of the former Baathist regime have either taken credit or been blamed for all of these...
...massacre, which killed about 5,000 people, is believed to be the deadliest chemical attack on civilians in history. That year Majid led a campaign that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds, and in the 1990s his victims included thousands of Shi'ites rebelling against the Baathist regime. In 2003, when the U.S. military put together a deck of cards with pictures of Iraq's most wanted, Majid was depicted as the king of spades...
...last few years, however, Syria has started to clamp down on insurgents trying to infiltrate Iraq, and in August a U.S. military delegation visited Damascus to discuss increased cooperation on border security. Even more promising has been the change of attitude of many former Baathists in Syria, who are broadly split into two factions: a hard-line group led by a former vice president in Saddam's government, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and a more moderate but less powerful group led by Muhammad Younis, a former adviser to Saddam's executive council. Younis's group began reaching...
Ironically, some of the best friends to Christians in the Middle East have been at odds with America and the West. The secular societies that formed in the 1950s and '60s in opposition to Israel - especially the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria, and Egypt under Nasser - were pretty good protectors of religious pluralism. About 5% or 6% of Iraq's population in the 1970s were Christian, and some of Saddam Hussein's most prominent officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, were Christians. But since the American invasion of Iraq, Christians have fled in droves, and constitute less than...
Iraq?s insurgency includes several disparate groups: religious zealots like the Takfiris (followers of an extremist form of Sunni Islam) and al-Qaeda, on the one hand, and remnants of Saddam?s former secular Baathist regime on the other. The two sides were united by their common enemies: U.S. troops and the Iraqis who worked with the ?occupiers,? like al-Maliki, but little else. (See a who's who of combatants in Iraq...