Word: ayatullah
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...week's end military officials in Baghdad claimed that Iraqi forces had also destroyed four oil tankers and commercial ships near Kharg Island, the major terminal for Iran's oil exports. Along the border near Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, troops loyal to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini massed for yet another offensive. Iraq appeared to have lost a bit of its much vaunted technological edge with the news that one of the five Super Etendard fighter-bombers it had bought from France had been damaged in a training flight. But for the moment the mass carnage...
...spattered book that was found with the body of the soldier offered a revealing glimpse of the fanaticism that has kept the war at its fevered pitch. The 193-page battlefront primer, titled Book of Souvenirs: Propaganda for the Front and for the War is the work of the Ayatullah's Revolutionary Guards and was intended to embolden the young volunteers in suicidal human-wave attacks. The bottom corner of each page of the book bears a printed blood-red splotch, symbolizing glorious martyrdom. There are photographs showing the Ayatullah in the midst of adoring Iranian masses, and crude...
...have little to be proud of in their conduct of the 42-month-old war in the Persian Gulf. Iraq shoulders the blame for starting it all, invading Iran in a reckless attempt to seize some long-disputed border territory from the new and untried revolutionary government of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran, having repulsed the invasion, has taken the war into Iraq in hopes of forcing the downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the creation in Baghdad of an Islamic republic modeled on Iran's own. Iran has routinely executed large numbers of Iraqi prisoners...
...armed and high spirited. Indeed, the war that Iraq's President Saddam Hussein launched in 1980 to topple Khomeini has so far only consolidated his hold. Some 45% of Iran's 42.5 million people are under 14, and many seem fired by a passionate loyalty to the Ayatullah. Perhaps 50% of the suicide-driven Basij corps are teenagers; eight-year-old zealots who stay at home may serve the regime by informing on their parents, sometimes sending them to the firing squads. "Considering our opposition to the regime," says a U.S. analyst, "we'd like...
Divisions may begin to surface once Khomeini is gone. Informed rumor has it the Ayatullah has already sent the name of his chosen successor, in a sealed envelope to be opened at his death, to the 60-man council of clergymen that will formally decide the issue. His most likely choice is Montazeri, the mastermind of the regime's attempts to export its revolution. But the short...