Word: sunni
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...devastating bombs last Tuesday changed everything, unraveling the precarious council unity and threatening to stall the political process altogether. A Sunni council member said the attacks had totally altered "sensitivities." First the constitution-signing ceremony was put off for three days of mourning. Then on Friday evening, as a sextet from the National Symphony Orchestra tuned up the national anthem and accompanied children from Baghdad's School of Music and Ballet, the landmark agreement fell apart. For the third time since November, the powerful Ayatullah Sistani spoiled Washington's plans. Each time his purpose seemed to be to ensure that...
...years as the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, consistently demonstrated support for violence against his country’s Shiite population. However, Hussein’s support for the violence was conditional: he had to be the one perpetrating it. So it was not a conventional expression of religious freedom when, last week, thousands of Shiite men took to the streets of Karbala, Iraq, to do something that the Baathi leader had made illegal for over two decades—beat, whip and knife themselves until their faces and clothing were drenched in blood...
...Forget, for a moment, Wolfowitz's wildly optimistic predictions for Iraq; what concerns us here are the assumptions he derived from his reading of the Sunni-Shia distinction. In many ways, they're a mirror image of the thinking in Washington two decades ago, when Shiite radicalism centered in Iran was deemed the most threatening. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. cooperated with Saudi Arabia in recruiting and arming hundreds of Sunni Muslim radicals to wage jihad. One unintended consequence of that program, of course, is the international jihadist brigade known today as al-Qaeda. But the operating...
...that enemy. That logic suggests bin Laden and his leadership circle would see a call for war against Shiites as inherently dangerous to al-Qaeda's wider objectives. Which means the dynamic confronting the U.S. both in Iraq and the wider Arab world seldom conforms to the binary Sunni vs. Shiite simplicities of which some in Washington appear to be rather fond...
...even as he blamed foreign extremists, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, also held the U.S. responsible for failing to provide adequate security. Shiite warnings against being provoked into sectarian reprisals against their Sunni countrymen were accompanied by a restatement of the urgency of restoring Iraqi sovereignty...