Word: najaf
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Followers of the cleric and members of his 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...
...problem, says Dr. Imam Ali Saleh, a Najaf-born Shi'ite scholar and religious leader, is that not even the most moderate Sunnis can stomach seeing Shi'ites in power. "A Sunni believes that the Shi'ite is inferior," he says...
...defunct cease-fire if attacks by government forces continued. And his response to a demand by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he disband his militia or face exclusion from the political process was typically ambiguous: Sadr said he would put the matter to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, and disband his army if Sistani, the most powerful Shi'ite religious authority in Iraq, ordered him to do so. That may simply have been a maneuver for sympathy on the Shi'ite street; Sistani has previously declined to be drawn on the matter of Sadr's militia...
Maliki's statement on Friday came amid Shi'ite demonstrations against the U.S. in Baghdad's Mahdi Army-dominated neighborhoods of Sadr City and Shula, and after a recent call by al-Sadr for a massive demonstration in Najaf, now scheduled for Baghdad on April 9. Crocker allayed fears that Sadr's provocative call for a million-man march would lead to renewed violence. "Millions of people converged on [the holy city of] Karbala for the Arba'een [a Shi'a holiday] in very peaceful conditions. I think that's what Iraqis now expect and want to see," he said...
...enemies in the south were "worse than al-Qaeda." A Sadrist spokesman then retorted that fighters should not surrender their weapons except to a government committed to ejecting U.S. troops from Iraq. But on Sunday, Sadr, in a statement released through his office in the holy city of Najaf, called on his followers to stop making "armed appearances." He said he hoped to avoid more bloodshed. This week's violence has claimed hundreds of lives in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere...