Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Shi'ite militias that forced Azhour Ali Mohammed from her home in Baghdad's al-Dolai district last month shot her husband Amer dead before her eyes and torched all her worldly possessions. And the fear that the killers may come back for her and her two little children prevented her from mourning her husband. "I could not hold a proper wake for him," says the young widow. "He deserved at least that...
...society with as much experience of violence as Iraq - up to half a million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war with Iran in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands were massacred on Saddam Hussein's orders in the 1990s, and tens of thousands have died in the Shi'ite-Sunni sectarian carnage in the past two years - learns to adapt its mourning traditions to its circumstances. During the war with Iran, Saddam barred newspapers from publishing wake notices; he worried that the sheer numbers of such notices would advertise just how badly his ill-judged war was going...
...intersections became festooned with black banners. The mounting death toll from suicide bombings and roadside explosions led to a boom in the funerary industry - coffin makers, grave diggers, caterers. Wakes were often held in mosques, and before sectarian hatreds flared up it was not uncommon for Sunnis to use Shi'ite mosques, or the other way around...
...Such ostentation is rare these days, since any display of wealth is likely to attract the attention of criminal gangs and kidnappers. Besides, mourning has itself become potentially deadly: Sunni suicide bombers have been known to target Shi'ite wakes, and Shi'ite militias have attacked Sunni funeral processions. So when Azhour went to collect her husband's body from Baghdad's central morgue, only her father and brother volunteered to go with her. They put Amer's body in a simple wooden coffin, strapped it onto the roof of the car and drove as quickly as possible...
...Fear of Shi'ite militias also prevented Azhour from posting a black banner to mark Amer's death. There was no question of holding his wake in a mosque; fearful of attacks, many of them refuse to allow wakes. Nor could Azhour hold the wake in their former neighborhood, where their old friends and neighbors could attend. So she invited a handful of family members to the home of an uncle who lives across town. Nobody came...