Word: ayatullah
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...issue at hand was the succession to the country's aging leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who is now 86 and reportedly in perilous health. Indeed, there is ample evidence that fervently anti-U.S. radicals like Mousavi are sharply at odds with pragmatists like Parliamentary Speaker Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 52, over the leadership of the Iranian revolution in the post-Khomeini...
...readers have reacted to the choice with approval, surprise, bemusement and in some cases, even anger. Although the title is always conferred on the person or group of individuals who, for better or worse, has dominated the year's news, Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939, 1942) and the Ayatullah Khomeini (1979) drew a legion of indignant letters...
Like several other events that shook the Middle East last week, the hijacking was almost certainly related to the 6 1/2-year-old war between Iraq and Iran. In Tehran, the government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini denied involvement and said it condemned "any moves that may threaten the lives of innocent passengers." But in Lebanon, several terrorist groups, including the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility for the hijacking. One survivor of the crash reported that the terrorists spoke with southern Lebanese accents, implying that they were indeed Shi'ite fundamentalists loyal to Khomeini...
...American weapons from Israeli stockpiles reveals that some of the proceeds were originally supposed to be funneled back into Iran to finance groups working to overthrow the Khomeini government. He displayed a memo written to Shimon Peres, then Israeli Prime Minister, which named this ingenious scheme of having the Ayatullah finance his own downfall as one of the goals of the arms sales...
...Iranians through a shadowy network: Khashoggi, Manucher Ghorbanifar -- an expatriate Iranian arms dealer -- and Israeli arms merchants were all part of it. The Israeli government, said Kimche, had confidence these Iranian contacts would eventually prevail in the power struggle already beginning in Tehran over the succession to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini...