Word: qom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Western concerns about its nuclear program or else face a new round of sanctions. But Iran has hardly been in an accommodating mood. A week ago it wrote to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to reveal that it was building a uranium-enrichment facility in the mountains near Qom. (Obama announced the existence of the hitherto secret facility four days later, and U.S. officials claimed that Tehran had preempted him only because it was aware that it had been caught red-handed.) (See pictures of people around the world protesting Iran's election...
Former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi is the public face of the opposition, but there are many others who are just as important, from former Presidents Mohammed Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to many grand ayatullahs in Qom, Iran's Vatican. Mousavi was chosen as spokesman for the opposition because of his impeccable revolutionary credentials. Even at the revolution's most militant violent and radical peak, Mousavi stood by Khomeini, never questioning his decisions. It was an office under Mousavi that coordinated a series of attacks against the U.S. in Lebanon, including an attack on the U.S. embassy...
...opposition has switched from challenging the June 12 election results to attacking the legitimacy of Khamenei himself. They are counting on Khamenei to continue cracking down on demonstrators, arresting larger numbers of opposition supporters and eventually jailing the leaders. In the end, they believe, Khamenei will so antagonize Qom's ayatullahs that the country's clerical leadership will issue a fatwa condemning Khamenei and the June 12 election. Such a fatwa would strip Khamenei of any legitimacy as Iran's clerical Supreme Leader, eroding his support in the Revolutionary Guards. Already, the enlisted men in the ranks of the Revolutionary...
...Khamenei, 69, was born in Meshhad to a family of religious scholars. Began advanced religious training in Qom while still a teenager, and shortly thereafter became a protege of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...congratulated Ahmadinejad on his re-election. There were congratulatory messages, too, from top Shi'ite leaders Abdel Aziz al-Hakim and Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim is in Tehran, receiving treatment for cancer, and Sadr is believed to be training to become an ayatullah in the Iranian holy city of Qom...