Sunni Muslims

Masked gunmen ambushed a religious school's van, killing five Sunni Muslims and wounding three others in the latest round of religious violence in Karachi, Pakistan's main city, police said. The attack led to violent protests, and five students were hurt when police opened fire on demonstrators.

MARAAT NUMAN, Syria - Each morning, after saluting the Syrian flag and before the warplanes take off, soldiers at army bases across Syria are given political orientation. During the lectures, conscripts and career officers alike are repeatedly told that opposition forces are fueled by sectarian hatred and want to tear the country apart. The message - of a war waged by Sunni Muslims against Syria's Alawite and Shiite minorities - is well understood. To Syrian soldiers, "It has essentially become sectarian; the Sunnis fight out of fear and the Alawites fight out of conviction," said Muhammad Zinedden, a Sunni conscript who defected in February from the 17th Engineering Regiment in Raqqa province.

Gunmen tied up and executed seven Sunni Muslim men, apparently in retaliation for the slaughter of Shiite Muslim worshipers last weekend, authorities said. An eighth man who was shot in the head survived, and five women were beaten with rifle butts but were not shot, police said. The massacre occurred in a middle-class Karachi neighborhood near two Shiite mosques where 20 worshipers were fatally shot Saturday.

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi government ordered 10 predominantly Sunni Muslim satellite television channels to cease broadcasting Sunday, accusing them of encouraging the sectarian unrest that left more than 200 people dead in a week of violence in northern Iraq. The stations included the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera and well-known local satellite stations. The move reflected the elevated tensions in the country since fighting erupted last week between Shiite Muslim-led security forces and Sunni Arab protesters, raising fears of a new civil war like the one that erupted from 2005 to 2008, when U.S. troops were still in the country.

Gunmen fired into a bakery complex bedecked with Shiite Muslim political posters here Friday while another group of militants car-bombed a Shiite mosque near Baqubah, killing more than 20 people in the two attacks. The deaths raised fears that Sunni Muslim insurgents are increasingly targeting the Shiite community, which is preparing for an important holiday.

Three gunmen hopped out of a pickup truck and opened fire on a Sunni Muslim mosque here Friday, injuring three people. In a nation unnerved by bombings and the assassination of a Shiite Muslim cleric, the attack raised fears of violence between the two religious sects.

The death toll continued to rise Monday from the murderous rivalry between two Muslim sects in Pakistan as masked gunmen opened fire on worshipers at a Sunni mosque, slaying at least 21 people, many of them praying boys from a religious school. The blood bath in Multan, a city in the eastern province of Punjab, came one day after the killing of a leader of the minority Shiite sect in a town 60 miles to the south.

Rival militiamen exchanged heavy gunfire today in the northern port city of Tripoli and on Beirut's front lines, killing at least three people and wounding nine others, police and radio reports said. To protest the violence engulfing Lebanon, Prime Minister Rashid Karami and other Sunni Muslims staged sit-ins at several mosques in West Beirut after noon prayers.

Gun battles between majority Sunnis and minority Shiites left at least 40 people dead and 43 wounded in remote northwestern Pakistan after men opened fire on Shiite Muslims, a Pakistani official said. Authorities had imposed a round-the-clock curfew to control the situation in Parachinar in North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, the official said. The trouble began Friday when gunmen began shooting at Shiites near their mosque, a resident said.

Shia Muslims in Pakistan, demanding enforcement of their religious code of law, battled police in the southwestern city of Quetta in a clash that left at least five people dead, officials said. They added that two police officers were among those killed in the capital of Baluchistan province, near the borders with Afghanistan and Iran. The Shias, a minority in Pakistan, are demanding that the government enforce their code of Islamic law, which differs from that of the majority Sunni Muslims.

ASTORE, Pakistan - The caravan pulled away, leaving behind 19 bullet-riddled bodies in a muddy ditch. Inside the three buses, those spared quietly wept. The remaining Shiite Muslims had just survived a massacre by Sunni Muslim militants. And the Sunnis aboard had just helped save as many of the Shiites as they could. Akhtar Hussain, a 37-year-old Shiite survivor, said he turned to the Sunni passengers when he finally disembarked in this tiny mountain hamlet. "I told them, 'I am grateful to you. If you would have said I was Shiite, I wouldn't be here right now. May God be with you.'" What happened on the remote mountain road in August didn't follow the script.

Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across Iraq on Friday, charging that Sunni Muslims had been disenfranchised under the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and pressing for detainees to be freed. Protests have raged for weeks and continued even after the Iraqi justice ministry freed nearly a dozen female prisoners and said it would transfer others to jails closer to their homes. The unrest has spread from Anbar province, where infuriated protesters have blocked a key highway, to other Sunni strongholds across northern and western Iraq.

BEIRUT - The deeply divided Syrian opposition took a step toward renewed unity Sunday, forming a new coalition designed to build stronger international support for its goal of ousting the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. After more than a week of sometimes contentious discussions in the Qatari capital, Doha, Syrian dissidents said they had come together and formed an alliance with an unwieldy title: the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces.

Days after the Bahraini government banned demonstrations by opponents, about 2,000 residents of the mostly Shiite Muslim village of Sitra turned a funeral into the first protest under a new three-month state of emergency, a show of deepening resistance against the regime. The government has arrested more dissidents and human rights workers, destroying their homes and also beating relatives, witnesses said. Many other activists have now gone into hiding in this tiny country, their family members said.

The captured leader of an outlawed militant group that has waged a years-long campaign of bombings and killings against Iranian authorities may soon be handed over to Tehran, Pakistani and Iranian news media reported Saturday. Abdul-Rauf Rigi, described as the leader of the Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluch group Jundallah, was arrested along the Iran- Pakistan border Dec. 22 and may be handed over to authorities in Shiite Muslim-run Iran after he is interrogated in Pakistan, Pakistani media reported.

Iraq's parliament knocked away one of the last barriers to forming a new government Saturday when it struck down a ban on three Sunni Muslim politicians. The reinstatement of former lawmaker Saleh Mutlak and two other politicians virtually guaranteed that their secular Iraqiya bloc, popular with Iraq's Sunnis, will join Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's government. Different Iraqi political groups and U.S. officials have pushed for a coalition government with a big role for the country's Sunni minority, who after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 waged an insurgency against the Americans and the new Shiite elite.

A Turkish high court ruled that religious education classes geared toward Sunni Muslims should not be compulsory, a major victory for a Shiite branch of Islam. The ruling affecting Turkey's Alevi community is also likely to please the European Union, which has made religious liberties a condition for Turkey's membership bid. The Alevis are followers of a tradition rooted in Shiite beliefs, and have long complained of discrimination and forced assimilation through mandatory courses on Sunni Islam in schools.

I think Geyelin has some basic misconceptions about Jews. Although Jesus was Jewish there is no reason to assume that all Jews are as tolerant and forgiving of personal and collective abuse as he was. As far as I know, Jews are human beings just like everyone else, and when they are threatened, as is the almost continual case by their fellow Semites, the Arabs, they get angry. Yes, they eventually hate. Arabs don't apologize for hating Jews certainly! Why does it seem that Jews and the Israeli government in particular are required to be better Christians than the rest of the world?

A bomb planted on a motorcycle killed five people Monday at a famed Sufi shrine in central Pakistan, the third terrorist attack at one of the country's many such shrines in four months. The latest attack occurred at the Baba Farid shrine in the town of Pakpattan in Punjab province, about 120 miles southwest of the eastern city of Lahore. A crowd had gathered about 6:20 a.m. for early prayers when the bomb exploded, said Shafiq Dogar, a Pakpattan senior administration official. "Two people parked the motorcycle near the eastern gate of the shrine, and the bomb was inside one of two milk cans on the motorcycle," Dogar said.

When Nabeel Rajab saw his picture splashed on the front pages of a state-run newspaper over the weekend as an alleged member of a terrorist network plotting to overthrow the government, he knew it was time to start packing. The prominent Bahraini human rights activist sent his children away and put toothpaste and shampoo into a small bag in anticipation of his arrest. "I've kept the children out of our home for the past four days," he told The Times by telephone on Monday. "I don't want to be beaten in front of them.