Word: ites
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Riyadh al-Nouri was several key things. He was the brother-in-law of Moqtada al-Sadr and a prominent official in the anti-American Shi'ite cleric's political organization. He was also, at one point in 2005, accused of spying for the Americans by members of his own party. And so, when he was shot and killed in the city of Kufa, reportedly by a gunman on a motorcycle, as he returned from Friday prayers, there were multiple suspects...
...powerful brother-in-law blamed the Americans. Some Sadrists believed rival Shi'ite militias may have been behind the killing; while others posit that it may have been an inside job from within the Sadr ranks. Only one thing is certain - the assassination has raised an outcry among Sadr's followers and threatened to push Iraq further into a relapse of sectarian violence, just as the Iraqi government prepared to lift its curfew on Sadr City, the battered Baghdad slum which is Sadr's stronghold...
...thousands-strong militia, the Mahdi Army - which has been engaged in heavy fighting with Iraqi and U.S. forces in recent weeks - expressed outrage on Friday afternoon, as news spread of Nouri's death. The province of Najaf, where Nouri was killed, has seen a rise in intra-Shi'ite violence in the past year, mostly in the form of tit-for-tat killings between Sadr's Mahdi Army and other Shi'ite militias, including the rival Badr Brigade, which has links to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party...
Whether the killing will, in fact, lead to more Shi'ite v. Shi'ite fighting in Najaf remains to be seen. Major Alayne Conway, a spokeswoman for the central division of the Multinational Forces, which operates in the Najaf area, told TIME: "I can tell you that one of our Military Transition Teams operating in Najaf was sent out to get an update on the situation and I know the Government of Najaf called us confirming that Riyadh al-Nouri was killed." But Conway was not aware of any violent reaction...
Zahra Rahim, the wife of Imam Saleh, says she has no problem with moderate Sunnis, but fears a rise in Wahhabism, a fundamentalist stream of Sunni Islam that rejects Shi'ite practice as heretical. Rahim, who wears a hijab headscarf, associates Wahhabism with the fully-veiled women she sees on the street who often refuse to return the greetings of Shi'ites. Two years ago, she says, her son Jafar came home from the Sunni-run Muslim National School and told her that his classmates had called him kafir, meaning infidel. Jafar, she says, was also taunted whenever a bomb...