Word: bakhtiar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...monumental impact across the Islamic world may appear to have been inevitable. It seemed like anything but certain destiny, however, to those of us on board the Air France 747 taking Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran that morning in 1979. The exiled Shah's Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, still controlled the country and commanded the armed forces, and our immediate concern was whether the air force might decide that the best way to solve the problem of what to do with the radical fundamentalist leader would be to blow us out of the sky. That threat didn...
...would take eight tumultuous days before Khomeini could wrest power from Bakhtiar, but already in his arrival speech he abandoned earlier hints of willingness to share power and demanded that the Prime Minister get out. Tipped off that the military was going to arrest him, Khomeini broadcast an appeal that brought tens of thousands of Iranians into the streets. Stores of weapons in the mosques were flowing into the hands of Khomeini loyalists, and a bloody civil war appeared almost certain...