Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...revolution was spinning out of control. With nonviolent protests and uncommon discipline, the people of Iran had ended the tyranny of the Shah. Their reward was not freedom but chaos, as the forces united around Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini last week showed the first dread signs of schism. Suddenly, guns were everywhere, in every hand, as self-styled "freedom fighters" liberated weapons from police stations and army barracks. In Tehran, Tabriz and other cities, sporadic fighting raised the death toll for the week to an estimated 1,500. A bewildering motley of forces was involved: troops loyal to the Shah, ethnic...
...some, it was the most shocking example yet of the virulent anti-Americanism that has surfaced during Iran's bloody revolution. To others, it was an apt symbol of American inability to influence, much less control, events in this troubled land. Last week, on the day after Ayatullah Khomeini exhorted his followers to lay down their arms, a band of 100 Iranian leftists attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Barrages of machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire raked the compound. Two Marine guards were wounded and an Iranian embassy employee was killed. After two hours of skirmishing, the attackers...
...time Khomeini and his advisers realized what was happening, some 300,000 weapons were in civilian hands. In a television appeal Tuesday night, the normally somnolent Ayatullah was visibly agitated and emotional as he asked his countrymen to surrender their weapons. Failing to do so, he declared, was haram (forbidden by their religion). A number of weapons were turned in, but most were not, and fighting continued intermittently. By Thursday, a holiday commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, the streets of Tehran were free of gun-toting troublemakers. But only until the sun went down. After dark, the sounds...
Meanwhile, the new revolutionary government was acting in an arbitrary manner that seemed at variance with the Ayatullah's previously expressed democratic ideals. After hasty−and private−trials, four officials of the former regime, including the head of the Shah's hated SAVAK secret police and three generals, were executed by firing squad on charges of "torture, massacre of people, treason and earthly corruption...
...failure to find some sort of compromise could also trigger a global banking panic, and that is something that would hurt Iran's creditors as much as Iran itself. Reports that Abol-Hassan Banisadr - said to be a leading candidate for Finance Minister in the regime that Ayatullah Khomeini wants to establish - plans to write off an undisclosed portion of Iran's foreign debt if cho sen for the post, were hardly reassuring. Said a Citibank vice president bravely: "Whatever comes out of this will be a sensible decision. Someone will be there with a level head...