Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the Iraqi Army, supported by American air power, battled militants outside the Shi'a holy city of Najaf last weekend it seemed at first like just another episode in the country's history of violence: a fight with Sunni insurgents bent on bloodying the Shi'a commemoration of Ashura, or a flare-up in the simmering battle between Shi'a political movements and militias...
...details were puzzling. Why would Sunni insurgents, who generally favor stand-off tactics like suicide bombings, mortar attacks and roadside bombs, make a target of themselves by massing hundreds of fighters deep in the Shi'a heartland? Why would Shi'a militias, which thrive on the support of the towns and neighborhoods from which they spring, stake a claim to a patch of farmland outside Najaf...
...information emerges it seems more and more likely that the enemy in the orchards outside Najaf was a cult-like offshoot of Shi'a Islam - men and women who believed the violence in Iraq was not just cataclysmic but apocalyptic. Iraqi officials say they rallied around a man who claimed to be the Mahdi - in Shi'a Islam, a spiritual leader who vanished in the late 9th century and whose return presages a final battle between good and evil. (Sunni Muslims have a quite different conception of the Mahdi, a redemptive figure who will walk the earth to establish peace...
...According to Iraqi soldiers involved in the battle and its aftermath, the group's leader, Ahmad al-Hassaani al-Yamani, planned to lead his followers into Najaf and kill the Shi'a religious leaders there. Chief among the targets would have been Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most revered Shi'a cleric in Iraq. His rivals slain, al-Yamani planned to lead his followers into the Imam Ali shrine, the resting place of Mohammad's son-in-law and one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites...
...Heaven's resistance. But a U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two American soldiers. Yamani died along with an unknown number of his fighters; many others were captured. Iraqi officials have offered varying descriptions of the fighters. They were first portrayed as al-Qaeda terrorists. Officials then acknowledged the Shi'a millenarian nature of the Army of Heaven, but still claimed the group was supported by Sunni terrorists and included foreign Arabs of the kind who flock to Iraq to fight under the banner of Sunni jihad...