Word: ite
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...suspicion fell on al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its leader there, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, subscribes to an extremist Sunni view that regards Shi'ism as an apostasy and all shrines as idolatrous abominations. Al-Zarqawi, whose group comprises mainly foreign jihadis, has encouraged his followers to attack Iraqi Shi'ite targets...
They could hardly have picked a more provocative one than al-Askari. It is associated with three venerated Shi'ite imams, including the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, who is believed to have disappeared in 878 into a tunnel directly under al-Askari. The two imams buried in the shrine were the Mahdi's father and grandfather. Most Shi'ites believe that the Mahdi will one day reappear as a messiah to bring justice to the world. That makes al-Askari one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites, exceeded in veneration only by the shrines of Najaf and Karbala. Even...
...grief hardened quickly into fury. Within 12 hours, Shi'ites across the country torched mosques, gunned down clerics and kidnapped Sunni families at gunpoint. As the violence escalated, it became less discriminating: among the victims were three journalists working for al-Arabiya television who were abducted and executed while reporting in Samarra. Gunmen then attacked the funeral cortege of one of the journalists, killing one person. On its way back from the cemetery outside Baghdad, the convoy was hit by a bomb, killing two others. On both sides, not all the stories of slaughter and desecration were immediately verifiable, since...
...feeling of loss was shared by all Iraqis, who struggled to make sense of what their countrymen had wrought. Although the violence of last week may have been sparked by a single act of provocation, it came in the context of a history of Shi'ite-Sunni enmity. The roots of the sectarian divide lie in a schism that arose shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Under Saddam, communal hostilities in Iraq were suppressed, their very existence denied. Beneath the surface, though, relations between the two sects have always been tainted by prejudice...
...invasion upended the "natural" order: in the past two elections, the Shi'ites have finally made their numerical superiority translate into political power, leaving many Sunnis bitter and resentful over their diminished status. It didn't help that many of the new Shi'ite ruling parties have ties to Iran, feeding Sunni suspicions about Shi'ite loyalties. In private, some Sunnis refer to Shi'ites as Iranians or Persians--in other words, traitors...