Word: shrines
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...tile walls of the holy shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf are riddled with bullets, the marble floors streaked with blood. Inside the gates of the besieged compound last week, members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army slept and patched up their wounds and died. But their determination never faltered, even under the withering firepower of the vastly superior army outside. Haidar, 23, had come to join the fight from his family's house just on the other side of the U.S. cordon encircling the shrine. "I was a history student, but now I have this," he said, waving...
...that he wasn't defeated militarily. Reports from the frontline leave no doubt that U.S. and Iraqi forces were closing in on the shrine, while many Sadrist fighters had already fled. But their "defense" of the most revered of Shiite shrines under fire from a widely loathed "infidel" army has further enhanced Moqtada Sadr's already considerable political standing among Iraqi Shiites - a fact that has led the interim government to stress that even after three weeks of violent defiance, it wants to draw Sadr into the political process, for the simple reason that he's too dangerous to them...
...merchant middle class, whereas in Iraq they're in opposition to the rabblerouser Moqtada. But the emotional tide generated by the Najaf standoff threatens a sea-change, which may be why Sistani is attempting to channel it behind his own leadership by calling a march on the shrine city...
...wait a long time before we got our chance. Young Mahdi Army fighters with wild eyes stopped by the office to show us their captured weapons. In the late afternoon, an old sheikh visited Abu Mohammed's office and said to us that he had just come from the shrine in Najaf. The sheikh described how he had walked through the American front lines without a problem, but if we wanted to go, we had to leave immediately. Abu Mohammed gave us an al Mahdi man named Talib to take with...
...just the edge of the battlefield; it would get much worse as we went deeper into the city. We walked another block and saw three teenagers near the charred remains of a car who asked us where we were going. We explained that we wanted to go to the shrine of Imam Ali. "We are going to the shrine,? one said. ?You can follow us." The boy who wanted to show us the way was not older than fourteen. As we went deeper into the city, Talib decided to return to Kufa and left us with the kids as guides...