Word: saddamism
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Still, U.S. officials are worried that an election as early as this summer would give Iraq's Shi'ites, who make up 60% of the population but were repressed by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, a tremendous edge. With Saddam's Baathist structures gone, the Sunnis are disorganized and demoralized. Shi'ite religious institutions, by contrast, are strong. Among some in Washington, that raises the specter of a replay of the 1979 Iranian revolution, in which fundamentalist Shi'ite clerics took charge of the government, which proved hostile...
...according to his official biography. In the early 1950s, he moved to the Iraqi city of Najaf, the site of one of the holiest shrines in Shi'ism. He later became a student of Grand Ayatullah Abul Khoei, who would turn out to be Iraq's leading cleric. As Saddam ruthlessly suppressed clerical activism, Khoei advocated "quietism," the belief that the clergy should mainly serve spiritual and social needs, and not focus on matters of state. Sistani quickly distinguished himself as a brilliant theologian, adept at applying religious doctrine to the dilemmas of modern life. (His website, sistani.org offers advice...
When Khoei died in 1992, Sistani succeeded him as the most prominent member of the hawza, the network of seminaries and mosques that dominates life in the city and generates huge sums in alms and tithes. Two years later, Saddam placed Sistani under house arrest. In response, Sistani established a base in Qum, in western Iran, and forged relationships with the ruling clergy in Tehran. But Sistani, like many other Shi'ite luminaries, disagrees with the Iranian practice of velayat-e faqih, or rule of the clergy. Aides say he has always discouraged clerics from holding political positions...
...just a house but a dream home, a resplendent country estate on the outskirts of Kirkuk, on which he had spent his life's fortune. The Kurd, Mohammed Abdullah, had moved into the house after the fall of Kirkuk in April, his original home nearby having been destroyed by Saddam Hussein's regime in the mid-1980s. "I told him it is sacrilegious to take someone's home," Assi says of the recent encounter as he stands outside his family's downsized new abode in downtown Kirkuk. "Then I offered that I should live in my house and he could...
...Kirkuk, Iraq's fifth largest city, the world's new Sarajevo, a site of ethnic cleansing and slaughter. Though Assi's encounter with Abdullah ended without bloodshed, at least two gun battles in the city have together left more than a dozen people dead. The trouble is rooted in Saddam's policy of moving fellow Arabs into the Kirkuk area to squeeze out the frequently rebellious native Kurds. The main objective was to secure Baghdad's control over Kirkuk's oil, which represents 6.4% of the world's known reserves. Now displaced Kurds are returning, sometimes routing the Arab settlers...