Word: alis
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Whoever they turn out to be, the man was right. They had. Among the more than 80 people who died when a car bomb exploded outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, 120 miles south of Baghdad, was Ayatullah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, one of the nation's most senior Shi'ite clerics and the founder of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). He had been leading the Friday prayers in the mosque. The atrocity was the most devastating event since the end of formal hostilities in the Iraq war and counts...
...first the Ayatullah's fate was unclear. The blast occurred moments after the Friday morning prayers, and most of those outside believed he had not yet left the shrine to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, in the heart of Najaf. Assuming that al-Hakim was still inside, many had thought he would have been protected from the explosion by the shrine's massive western wall and its huge door, the Bab-e-Kibbleh, which remained standing. But when the bomb went off, the 64-year-old cleric was outside the shrine and about to get into...
...straining to cope with the load. "This is a catastrophe for Iraqis," said Hassan al-Naji al-Moussawi, imam of the Mohsen Mosque in Sadr City, Baghdad's Shi'ite-dominated suburb, once known as Saddam City. "And for it to happen at the walls of the Imam Ali shrine, it's as if somebody has reached into the body of Iraq and cut off an organ...
...unclear whether Ali was the target, or whether the bombers had meant to hit the policemen training under American supervision in the academy. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack...
...blast was smaller than the explosions at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf last week and at the United Nations HQ the week before, but it was no less audacious in its choice of target. And it will likely have a greater impact than those blasts on the psyche of ordinary Iraqis. "If the police headquarters can be bombed," says Hani Humaileh Obaid, who had come to the compound for identity papers confiscated by the cops, "then no place is safe for Iraqis...