Word: clerics
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Sometimes they just got lucky: a 12-man Green Beret team in customized humvees came upon a Shi'ite cleric and several hundred of his anti-Saddam disciples near Basra on March 20, according to the team's intelligence officer. The cleric sheltered the U.S. troops and their vehicles in warehouses as they plotted joint maneuvers. The Americans deputized the locals and then passed out Chinese-made weapons to the cleric's men and led them on a number of successful raids, seizing more than 100 antitank missiles. When the same Green Berets couldn't dislodge a well-entrenched Iraqi...
...lambs are wedged into a conveyer belt that carries them from the holding pen to the butcher. Some bleat insistently but most are quiet, bewildered. The machine stops for a moment and Mohammad Hussain, a Muslim cleric who sees to it that all slaughtering at Birmingham's Pak Mecca Meats abattoir is in keeping with religious law, strokes a lamb's head as he waits. The lamb's eyes close in contentment for a moment, until the conveyer whirs back into action. Hussain intones the Muslim blessing, and then with a single expert swipe nearly severs the animal's head...
Perhaps. But even so, prepare for the humvee to stay parked down the street for some time. "Pardon me, speaking frankly," said a leading Shi'ite cleric to Garner last week. "Do not abandon your work too soon. If you say you will stay here for two years, I say stay for four." Like the man said, you have to be patient. --Reported by Malcolm MacPherson/Arbil, Paul Quinn-Judge, Romesh Ratnesar and Nir Rosen/Baghdad and Mark Thompson/Washington
...Tuwaitha, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad stunned the U.S. forces. In mid May, U.S. and Iraqi officials toured surrounding villages, offering a "one-off" deal to buy back any looted items for $3 each. They recovered about half of the 256 stolen yellow cake barrels. A local Shiite cleric persuaded his parishioners to hand over more looted items, some possibly radioactive. These are piled haphazardly in the courtyard of a disused school, but the imam, who does not recognize the authority of the U.S., refuses to hand them over without the permission of his superiors...
Perhaps the most encouraging development of detained Muslim cleric and alleged Jemaah Islamiah (JI) leader Abubakar Ba'asyir's first day in court last Wednesday was what happened outside of it: nothing. Only a handful of curious passersby peeked into the Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics in North Jakarta, where the proceedings are being held. Security was conspicuously light; police were armed only with batons. Abubakar, who maintains his innocence, sat impassively as prosecutors read out the four charges against him: treason, plotting to assassinate the President and two immigration violations...