Sunni Quotes

The Sunnis no longer recognize the centralized government as a legitimate power. The Shia militia that is moving around is calling out war crimes that are anti-Sunni. So, the Sunnis are in a tough spot. Do they move to an ISIS, which is a radical Islamic terrorist organization? Or do they defend themselves? Or do they give up?

Syria is a multi-confessional state: in addition to Sunni and Shia Muslims, there are Alawites, Orthodox and other Christian confessions, Druzes, and Kurds.

The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the danger of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief.

What we would be committed to would be a representative government where all the Iraqi people decide who should lead their nation, and lead it in a way that keeps it together as a single nation and where all parts of the nation - Shia, Sunni and Kurds - are able to live free and in peace and believe that their interests are represented by the government.

I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.

The oldest civil war on the planet is the one between the Sunni and Shiites over who is the proper successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

Actually, King Abdullah, under his supervision and guidance, has established a dialogue in Saudi Arabia whereby all the population, whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.

In the exodus out of Iraq, we're seeing the effects of just leaving. We left before there was control of chemical weapons stockpiles, without a status-of-forces agreement. We left before the Sunni and Kurds we fought with and fought alongside with were stable, or without empowering them. We left on a political rhetoric.

If the Sunni and Shia, or those nations that surround Saudi Arabia and those nations that gather around Tehran or Iran fight each other, that is the trigger that will bring about the War of Armageddon.

The civil war across the Middle East between the Shia and the Sunni empowers groups like ISIS and al Qaeda who claim to be the defenders of Sunni rights against Shia attack.

These Sunni Arabs in places like al Anbar province in Iraq, where I served back in 2007, if they see Iran as the dominant power, a Shiite country, they're going to be much more likely to want to join ISIS.

We encountered the greatest resistance when we abolished the caliphate. But the two-headed system could not go on for ever. It nourished the expectation that the sovereign would return under the guise of caliph…and gave hope to the [Ottoman dynasty].

Not counting the brand of Sunni Islam practised by the so-called Islamic State, there is probably no religion in the world that comes in for more flak than Scientology.

The Sunni militants that make up ISIS are not the underlying problem in Syria and Iraq, but rather they are a symptom of other deeper problems.

I think indeed our response on counterinsurgency needs to be finely tuned to the needs of Afghanistan. This is not Iraq. We don't have a Sons of Iraq here. We don't have the same divisions here that we had between Sunni and Shia.

We need to do a very professional and robust job of advising the Iraqi military. I mean robust with a complete staff to advise the Iraqi battalion as professionally as possible. Then I want to equip them very well---just like we are. Not with the second class equipment we give them…. And I would jump-start the economy … do what FDR did, employ the youth with a CCC type organization…. Then give each Iraqi citizen a portion of the oil revenue personally, just like we do in Alaska. Separate the regional government into 3 areas, Shiite, Sunni and Kurd… If we don’t do that we are finished.

The terrorists want civil war. Al-Qaida is attacking Shiites. The Shiite militias are taking revenge on the Sunnis. And the Sunnis are become more extremist, with some joining al-Qaida.

What really counts are good endings, not flawed beginnings.