Word: clerical
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...spokesman for the past year. Like Jaafari, Maliki is a Shi'ite Islamist of the Dawa party who spent some of his exile in Iran (the rest was in Damascus, while Jaafari went to London); like Jaafari he owes his position to the backing of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Both men have been accused of having a sectarian outlook despite their public embrace of national unity; both are Iraqi nationalists who oppose the dismembering of Iraq into semi-autonomous mini states; both would also abide by the wishes of Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah...
...orphanage by an armed gang just after the U.S. invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence "for her sake" to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director...
...favored Abdul Adel Mahdi as his replacement. Not only is there resentment created by U.S. intervention in the political process, but Adel-Mahdi is the candidate of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the arch-rival of Jaafari's major backer, the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. More likely is the emergence of a weak compromise candidate to preside over a fractious government facing divisive issues ranging from revising the constitution and oil revenues to dealing with the militias responsible for growing sectarian strife. Not surprising, then, that Secretary Rice warned Wednesday that violence in Iraq will...
...signal from, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Shi'ite spiritual authority. Sistani had refrained from intervening on the question of the nominee, although he had insisted that the Shi'ite bloc remain united at all costs. But a meeting Wednesday by UN representative Ashraf Qazi with the cleric, who refuses to talk to U.S. officials, may have prompted him to act out of concern over growing sectarian violence...
...with near impunity. While Allawi says 15 of 18 provinces are controlled by forces friendly to the new Iraqi government, that grip is shaky in Sunni areas. Even in the relatively subdued Shi'ite south, coalition forces and their Iraqi recruits face daily harassment from militants loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. And the military believes that the al-Zarqawi-led insurgency is becoming more ruthless and resilient. "If we don't kill or capture them," says a U.S. general in Iraq, "they move on to fight somewhere else...