Word: karbala
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...troops have stepped back, Shi'ite and Kurd political parties are relying on their own armed militias to step in. Especially after Tuesday's bloodbath, no one feels safe enough to disarm. Gun-toting Shi'ite militiamen clad in black flooded the bomb-scarred neighborhoods of Karbala and Baghdad, setting up checkpoints and clearing the streets. Thousands of Shi'ites are under arms, divided into two major groups. One, the Jaish al-Mahdi, is aligned with the firebrand radical Muqtada al-Sadr and posts its secretive fighters at his Baghdad strongholds. "Every day people are coming in to volunteer," Sheik...
...against his country’s Shiite population. However, Hussein’s support for the violence was conditional: he had to be the one perpetrating it. So it was not a conventional expression of religious freedom when, last week, thousands of Shiite men took to the streets of Karbala, Iraq, to do something that the Baathi leader had made illegal for over two decades—beat, whip and knife themselves until their faces and clothing were drenched in blood...
...covered the event with equal parts fascination and horror. Graphic images of the Ashura procession were the most popular photographs on Yahoo! early last week, and virtually all the major newspapers and television networks eagerly reported on the self-mutilation ritual before it was overshadowed by terror attacks in Karbala and Baghdad later that day. Though the coverage varied in style and tone, the skewed focus on Ashura’s violent rather than religious aspects seemed to reflect the media’s prejudices as much more than the holiday itself. “Look at these people...
News coverage of Ashura was similarly superficial, almost entirely ignoring the holiday’s religious significance and, in the case of Karbala, the one million other worshipers who weren’t contributing to the self-inflicted blood loss. Like Gibson, many of the Karbala arguably focused too much on violence and not enough on the non-physical elements of their faith. Nevertheless, the media’s one-dimensional portrait of the holiday mostly served to betray its own unhealthy fixations...
Colonel Kareem Hajem, police chief of Karbala, says investigators believe that Iraqi Salafists carried out the suicide blasts that killed six coalition soldiers and a dozen Iraqi policemen in the city last month. A senior military official says the U.S. is paying more attention to the role of Salafists because of their "long-standing relationship to terrorism in other locations." The official mentions Algeria's violent Salafist Group for Call and Combat...