Word: ites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great revolutionary upheavals of this century? To begin with, the time was ripe. The Shah had pushed his feudal and devout country into the modern, secular world too far and too fast, using torture and execution to suppress dissent. In addition, Khomeini's place in the world of Shi'ite theology gave him a platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other, much larger branch, Shi'ites believe in an intermediary between God and man. In Shi'ism's first centuries, this role of mediator was played by the Twelve Imams, who were thought to be the rightful successors...
...first day: Terry Anderson lies on a cot in a dingy apartment in Beirut's sprawling, bomb-ravaged Shi'ite slums. A blindfold is tightly wrapped around his head, and chains shackle a wrist and ankle, biting into the flesh. He can hear the roar of jets; Beirut airport is near. The former U.S. Marine is % stunned and sobs constantly, frustrated, angry and afraid that the kidnapers intend to execute him. A guard bursts in and threatens him merely because he creaked the bedsprings. "I am a friend of the Lebanese," Anderson had told his family. "They won't kidnap...
...secret who holds Terry Anderson. Imad Mughniyah is his name. He is a 38-year-old Lebanese leader of the Shi'ite fundamentalist group Hizballah whose history of terrorism is grislier than the record of Palestinian renegade Abu Nidal. Mughniyah's villainy, U.S. officials say, runs from bombings, like the suicide attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, to hijackings. He is a prime suspect in the U.S. for his alleged role in the 1985 skyjacking of TWA Flight 847 in which a Navy diver was murdered. And he has made a specialty of kidnaping: U.S. officials...
...ventured into Beirut's southern suburbs to quiz Hizballah spiritual leader Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. But Anderson's colleagues at the Associated Press believe he may have put himself on Hizballah's blacklist as far back as 1983, when he traveled to their stronghold in Baalbek to grill Shi'ite leaders about the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks...
...grandson of a Shi'ite mullah, Mughniyah trained with Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. A high school dropout, he excelled at terrorism; his boldness and quick grasp of explosives and weaponry impressed his commanders. But he fell out with Fatah leaders and in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon and occupied his village, Teir Debbe, Mughniyah joined the newly formed and more radical Hizballah (Party of God). He took to wearing religious garb even as he recruited activists and professionals to the Shi'ite cause. He rose quickly to the top of the organization...