Word: clericalization
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Among the many questions that remain unanswered is whether the horror in Fallujah represented an isolated spasm of mob violence or a more corrosive, widespread streak of anti-American hatred. On Saturday, Shi'ite followers of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr marched and burned American flags, promising if asked to be the hand of Hamas and Hizballah in Iraq. But galling as the images in Fallujah were, U.S. commanders say the city and the surrounding area remain a uniquely difficult problem, with little bearing on what's happening in the rest of the country. The military continues to believe that...
...Prophet Muhammad prohibited even the mutilation of a dead mad dog ... What happened in Fallujah is a distortion of Islamic principles, and it is forbidden in Islam." SHEIK KHALID AHMED, senior Islamic cleric in Fallujah, condemning the mutilation of the corpses of four U.S. civilians by Iraqis...
...than 200 Iraqis have been killed in the past four days, and the fighting is showing no signs of abating. And the fact that the Sunni militants who have waged a year-long insurgency are now joined, in Baghdad and across the Shiite south, by militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has cast doubt over prospects for the U.S. achieving its political objectives in Iraq in the near future. As Republican senator Chuck Hagel put it last weekend, the U.S. may be "dangerously close" to losing control in Iraq...
...commanders ponder a response to Friday's Shiite festival of Araba'in, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of Shiites to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. That's because the city is currently under the control of Moqtada Sadr's militia, and the cleric is holed up in his office there near the tomb of Imam Ali, the holiest shrine of the Shiite sect. The U.S. has vowed to destroy the Mahdi militia and arrest Moqtada, but the expected convergence on Najaf on Friday raises the stakes in a confrontation with the cleric who has vowed...
...Sadr has long been the wild card factor facing the U.S. mission in Iraq. Neither the U.S. nor its Iraqi exile allies had reckoned with the strength of the underground organization the young radical cleric had built in Iraq under Saddam Hussein - a necessity since Moqtada was the inheritor of a distinguished line of militant Shiite clerics who had been assassinated for challenging the Baathist regime. When Baghdad fell on April 9, Sadr was first out of the blocks in the race to build a power base in the Shiite community. Within weeks, Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood had been renamed...