Word: shia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mind when it expanded a fledgling parathletics foundation to include wounded veterans returning from the front. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers died in the eight-year war, and more than 400,000 were injured, many by land mines. The celebration of martyrdom, a tenet of Islam's Shia branch, provided the backbone for a revolutionary rhetoric that idealized sacrifice?an important propaganda tool for a young theocracy struggling to justify an ongoing war and a harsh Islamic regime. Veterans who had risked life and limb to defend their country were hailed as living martyrs. But for many, such...
...Indeed, the major problem facing the Coalition in response to the insurgencies is that there is no Iraqi leadership of significant standing among either the Sunni or the Shia speaking unambiguously in support of the Coalition's goals. Some on the Iraqi Governing Council have denounced Moqtada and his calls for violence. Others have focused their ire at Coalition responses. But the U.S. long ago recognized that the IGC has limited support among Iraqis. Far more important than the Coalition military effort eliminate the Mahdi militia will be the stance adopted by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Even if Moqtada himself...
...local hostility there that its presence in Saudi Arabia had generated. Wolfowitz replied: "First of all, the Iraqi population is completely different from the Saudi population. The Iraqis are among the most educated people in the Arab world. They are by and large quite secular. They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory. We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate...
...Forget, for a moment, Wolfowitz's wildly optimistic predictions for Iraq; what concerns us here are the assumptions he derived from his reading of the Sunni-Shia distinction. In many ways, they're a mirror image of the thinking in Washington two decades ago, when Shiite radicalism centered in Iran was deemed the most threatening. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. cooperated with Saudi Arabia in recruiting and arming hundreds of Sunni Muslim radicals to wage jihad. One unintended consequence of that program, of course, is the international jihadist brigade known today as al-Qaeda. But the operating...
...there are worrying signs emerging among the Shiite majority. While the leading clerics and some of the Shiite organizations previously based in Iran have counseled moderation and working with the U.S. authority, the young firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr appears to be wrapping his own bid for supremacy among the Shia in an increasingly strident campaign to confront the occupation, reinforcing his claims to leadership of the streets by channeling popular sentiment over the heads of those taking a more moderate approach. Last weekend's clashes at Karbala, in which one Iraqi was killed and a number wounded in a demonstration...