Word: sunni
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...Tuesday's admission by interim prime minister Iyad Allawi that voting will be impossible in "pockets" of insurgent violence underscores the likelihood that the legitimacy - and finality - of the results will be questioned by important constituencies inside Iraq, and in its neighborhood. The repeated requests by moderate Sunni (and even some Kurdish) leaders, including Sunni interim president Ghazi al-Yawer, for postponement of the polls has positioned them to question its outcome. So, too, the neighbors: Speaking in Washington earlier this week, Jordan's ambassador to the U.S. questioned the validity of an election in which, he said...
...Baghdad, and between them house as much as half of Iraq's population. There will be a limited number of polling stations even in some of the most dangerous regions, but it's also relatively certain that the raging insurgency - and the political opposition to the poll among some Sunni groups - will keep hundreds of thousands of prospective voters away from the polls throughout the Sunni heartland, as well as in such major cities as Mosul and Baghdad. Still, Prime Minister Allawi believes that to postpone the poll would be to capitulate before the insurgency, and it's far from...
Voters too are frightened. Iraqi elder statesman Adnan Pachachi says many residents of big cities like Mosul, Ramadi and Samarra want to participate but are too scared to even register. He suspects that few in the Sunni minority will go to the polls--perhaps not even 10%--which could undermine the election's legitimacy. "Many people from Arab countries will say this is not a correct election," says Dr. Sa'ad Abdul al-Razzak of Pachachi's party. U.S. officials say they will urge Shi'ite leaders to reach out to Sunnis after the election to bring them into...
...foreseeable end, top Pentagon officials have maintained that the nation's Army is fit enough and big enough to fight it. But last week the military's taut tendons--at the breaking point for better than a year--could be heard painfully snapping from the Pentagon to the Sunni triangle. First came a warning from the head of the Army Reserve that those troops are "rapidly degenerating into a broken force." Then Army officials, speaking privately, conceded that a long-standing policy limiting deployments of National Guard and Army Reserve forces is likely to be scrapped. That's going...
...looks to be the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shiite religious parties and independents assembled under the discreet auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (who has also declared voting a religious duty for Iraq's Muslim faithful). While some leaders of that slate sought this week to assuage Sunni and U.S. fears over their ties to Iran - and their desire to avert a civil war and hold Iraq together strongly suggests they'll avoid mimicking Iran's theocracy and will reach out to the Sunnis - the fact remains that the dominant parties on the list are historically far closer...