Word: shi'a
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...Iran considers itself the leader of the world's Shi'ite Muslims, and India has the world's second largest Shi'ite population, at 20 million. Iran has previously backed India against Pakistan's claims over Kashmir in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international forum of Muslim and Muslim-majority countries. Iranian ports have also allowed India to circumnavigate Pakistan in trading with Central Asia. Iran, for its part, needs Indian business, investment and technology cooperation...
...factors, including his African heritage, his partly Muslim family ties, and a belief that Obama would move to end Washington's 30-year Cold War with Tehran - or at least reduce the prospect of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic. "I think people want him to win," Shi'ite cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the reformist former parliament speaker defeated by Ahmadinejad in Iran's 2005 presidential contest, told TIME...
...only the policy expectations that account for Obama's popularity: his Third World ethnic background and the Muslim faith of his father's Kenyan family - even his middle name, Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and a revered figure in the Shi'ite Islam practiced in Iran - offer points of affinity that some analysts believe could give Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the political cover to make a gesture of reconciliation to the country long decried in Tehran as "the Great Satan...
Lack of professionalism is only one of the problems plaguing Iraq's floundering forces. More troublesome is their heavily sectarian composition. Throughout southern Iraq, members of the police and army are pulled largely from the Badr Brigade - a militia tied to a Shi'ite political party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is the chief rival of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. A number of MPs in Baghdad even suspect that Maliki's Basra assault was a poorly disguised government campaign to wipe out Sadr's base of popularity before local elections in October. That...
...This is, I think, an important time," said Rice, who credited al-Maliki's confrontation with al-Sadr's Shi'ite militia with shoring up government support among Iraq's Kurds and Sunnis. "You've seen a coalescing of a center in Iraqi politics." Maliki, also a Shi'ite, had drawn criticism in the past by Sunni factions in particular for failing to crack down on the Mahdi Army, which is blamed for much of the sectarian violence in Iraq...