Word: sunni
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...Mohammed, a strategist for a prominent Islamic nationalist group. "We hit and move. We're more like groups of gangs that can't be pinned down and can't be stamped out." The vast majority of those groups fall into a category the military dubiously refers to as Sunni "rejectionists." Mostly Baathists, nationalists and Iraqi Islamists, they oppose the occupation and any Baghdad government dominated by Iraqis sheltered from Saddam by foreign-intelligence agencies, such as Iran's or the U.S.'s. But they don't oppose democracy in Iraq. Many voted in the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and have...
...justifying wars, have been subverted by the U.S. It is time to withdraw the illegal army of occupation and devise a timetable for a multinational U.N. force of peacekeepers. Stephen Liddle Napier, New Zealand Perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction for the antidote to violence in the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was in power, he suppressed most resistance through sheer force and an aggressive, overwhelming response to any uprising. I'm sure that the Kurds and the Shi'ite majority, with the support of the U.S., could deal with the Fallujah insurgents. Sometimes...
First and foremost, the political process--including significant Sunni participation--must pass its capstone test during the Dec. 15 election. Beyond that, Pentagon planners are tracking four main issues: enemy strength, the capability of Iraq's own security forces, effective local governance and technical and communication abilities to allow U.S. troops to talk to and support Iraqi forces when they need reinforcement. The U.S. military insists that all those benchmarks are trending in the right direction. For example, the Americans say that despite launching 50 attacks a day, the insurgents have been unable to derail political progress. Even more heartening...
...been able to feed off the dislike most Iraqis have for the occupation. "The slow withdrawal of U.S. forces should eat away an important part of the insurgents' support base" and diminish their strength, predicts Seth Jones, an Iraq analyst at the Rand Corp. who advises the Pentagon. Many Sunni Arabs who boycotted Iraq's elections last January appear genuinely interested in participating in the Dec. 15 vote, while Iraqi nationalists and former regime members active in the insurgency are signaling an interest in forming political parties rather than in continuing armed jihad. At the Cairo meeting, Iraqi leaders even...
Although the U.S. is making progress in training Iraqi units to fight on their own, there is growing evidence that many Iraqi soldiers are more loyal to religious or ethnic factions than to the central government. Sunni Arabs are worried that the new Iraqi army and the Interior Ministry's security forces are infiltrated by partisan Shi'ite and Kurdish militias who target Sunnis for reprisals--a fear that gained credence this month with the discovery of 173 mostly Sunni detainees in an Interior Ministry building who were malnourished and in some cases showed signs of torture. "If the Iraqi...