Word: imam
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...tile walls of the holy shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf are riddled with bullets, the marble floors streaked with blood. Inside the gates of the besieged compound last week, members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army slept and patched up their wounds and died. But their determination never faltered, even under the withering firepower of the vastly superior army outside. Haidar, 23, had come to join the fight from his family's house just on the other side of the U.S. cordon encircling the shrine. "I was a history student, but now I have this," he said, waving...
LESSONS OF NAJAF Even if the battle for control of the Imam Ali shrine ends in Muqtada al-Sadr's retreat, the struggle for control of the country is far from over. Strike too hard, and the insurgency will only harden. Back down, and risk losing politically. Is there a way out of this dilemma...
...return of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani sets the stage for ending the siege of Najaf. And the fact that the three-week battle looks set to end with a mass march by Iraqi Shiites to "save the (Imam Ali) Mosque" is a telling indicator of how the siege changed Iraq's power equation. Sistani has demanded that the U.S. and Iraqi forces withdraw from around the mosque and that Sadr's gunmen leave before he'll enter. The U.S. and the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi may have no option but to comply, because alienating Sistani, the most...
...Sadr will likely emerge from the Najaf siege intact, and his supporters will be looking for guidance on their next step. Although they were forced to surrender the Imam Ali Mosque - to Sistani, not to the Iraqi government - they also showed considerable ability to cause problems through guerrilla warfare from Baghdad to Basra, the latter city being where they took Iraq's oil exports offline for days at a time. The Iraqi government will persist with efforts to bring him on board, but he's reluctant to accord them legitimacy, and he may be assuming that the siege has actually...
...edge of the battlefield; it would get much worse as we went deeper into the city. We walked another block and saw three teenagers near the charred remains of a car who asked us where we were going. We explained that we wanted to go to the shrine of Imam Ali. "We are going to the shrine,? one said. ?You can follow us." The boy who wanted to show us the way was not older than fourteen. As we went deeper into the city, Talib decided to return to Kufa and left us with the kids as guides...