Word: clerics
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...ARRESTED. ABUBAKAR BA'ASYIR, 66, Indonesian Muslim cleric; on the day he was to be freed after serving 18 months for minor immigration offenses and document forgery; in Jakarta. Police claim they have new evidence that he is the leader of the radical group Jemaah Islamiah and that he approved a string of bombings, including the October 2002 Bali attack that killed 202 people. (Abubakar has consistently denied involvement in terrorist activities, and is suing TIME for a 2002 article that accused him of links to terrorism...
...give the idea serious consideration. Others included an attempt by Algerian terrorists to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. A foreign intelligence service told U.S. agents in 1998 of al-Qaeda plans to hijack a plane and bargain for the release of blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who was in a U.S. prison for his role in the first World Trade Center attack...
...aimed at suspending coalition military assaults, which many pro-American Iraqis believed was doing more harm than good in winning hearts and minds across the country. The diplomatic tack looked more likely to bear fruit in the Shi'ite-dominated south, where fighters loyal to the young Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seemed to be abiding by a cease-fire, even as U.S. troops staged outside the holy city of Najaf. In Fallujah, by contrast, rebels killed nine U.S. Marines in a breach of the truce declared by U.S. commanders. A man who claimed to have participated...
...made Sistani decidedly political, allowing him to fashion himself as the defender of Iraqi rights while exercising influence over the future shape of the country. He was born in Mashhad, Iran, to a prominent family of Islamic scholars; indeed, his story has parallels to that of another Iranian cleric from Najaf who rose to power--Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. But Sistani is no Khomeini. He has long preached that the Shi'ite clergy stay out of politics to avoid being sullied by deals and compromise. His vision is of a Shi'ite orthodoxy that exercises influence over Shi'ite lives--much...
...Iraqi caretaker government. That's hardly a hypothetical problem, as the current standoffs at Fallujah and Najaf show: Iraqi Governing Council leaders, including one or two tapped for top positions in the caretaker government, objected furiously to U.S. tactics at Fallujah and against the Shiite supporters of the cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fact that the U.S. military backed off in both Najaf and Fallujah to allow Iraqi politicians space to try and resolve those standoffs through negotiations is telling. While the U.S. military is following the natural instinct of an occupying army to establish its authority and protect its forces...