Word: imams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shape post-Saddam Iraq. Indeed, the national conference called to create an interim legislature found its main business eclipsed by concern over the standoff, and responded with great relief to an announcement Wednesday that Sadr had purportedly agreed to heed government demands to put down their weapons, leave the Imam Ali Mosque and join the political process. But the delegates' relief may be premature: Sadr's spokesman made clear that he was going nowhere until U.S. and Iraqi government forces pulled back from around the shrine and a cease-fire was in force. And while the latest truce announcement looks...
...ordered by Allawi's government, its deputy president Ibrahim Jaafari called for a halt to the offensive, and there were scores of resignations of lower-level regional government officials in protest of the clashes in Najaf. The government rushed to assure Iraqis that American forces would not enter the Imam Ali Mosque, and any fighting there would be done by Iraqi security forces. The problem was, U.S. commanders had reportedly concluded that the Iraqi forces in the city had trouble achieving even "minor combat objectives...
...match for more than 3,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed number of Iraqi personnel deployed there, the political circumstances in which the battle was waged forced the Marines to fight with one hand tied behind their backs: Sadr's men were holed up in and around the Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest shrine in the Shiite Muslim tradition, and any damage to the mosque could provoke a massive Shiite uprising that might imperil the entire project of remaking Iraq...
...fighting between Marines and members of Sadr's Mehdi Army in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, in which hundreds of militiamen have reportedly been killed, Marines supported by helicopters and tanks entered the city to throw a steel cordon around the militants holed up in and around the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiism's holiest shrine. Sensitive to the danger that any damage to the shrine could provoke a nationwide Shiite uprising, the new Iraqi government insists that U.S. soldiers won't actually enter the shrine. But the intensity of the fighting clearly carries a huge political risk for Prime...
...fight began when the governor of Najaf sought to have his own security forces eject the Sadrists from the large cemetery adjacent to the Imam Ali shrine, which they'd occupied since a cease-fire was brokered in June. The governor charged that the Sadrist presence, and their stockpiling of weapons, violated the terms of the cease-fire; the Sadrists claimed it was the governor's men who were violating the cease-fire and responded by occupying police stations and taking hostages. As soon as the confrontation turned violent, the Iraqi security forces were forced to call in the Marines...