WORLD
March 7, 2013 | By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
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.
WORLD
January 4, 2013 | By Emily Alpert
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.
WORLD
November 11, 2012 | Patrick J. McDonnell and Rima Marrouch, Los Angeles Times
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.
WORLD
March 19, 2011 | By Neela Banerjee and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
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.
WORLD
December 26, 2010 | By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
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.
WORLD
December 19, 2010 | By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, Los Angeles Times
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.