Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rooftops in the old city are crowded with spectators; a tin roof buckles under their weight. Police have closed down the streets; Afghan National Army soldiers guard intersections - Ashura rituals have often attracted Shi'ism's most violent sectarian foes, as the violence that has in recent days wracked Najaf in Iraq, and Karachi and Peshawar in Pakistan, where 14 were killed on Sunday in a suicide bombing. But here in Kabul, the only blood spilled is that collecting at the feet of the participants. "We are all Muslim. It is not important whether we pray with open hands...
Imam Ali Hussein died 1327 years ago, but for the Shi'ite Muslim faithful in Kabul - and everywhere else - it might as well have been yesterday. There is a vivid intensity to their mourning of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad with black banners, dirges, funereal marches and somber sermons in mosques - and also by ritual bloodletting and physical mortification. Every year, during the festival of Ashura, Shi'ites symbolically punish themselves for their failure to rally to their imam at the Battle of Karbala and save him from his enemies in a conflict that marked the beginning...
...This is no desultory passion play. Even a non-religious foreign observer cannot fail to be moved by the intensity of faith that courses through the tiny room, a collective surge of emotion connecting today's Shi'ites with the events that marked their division from Sunnis and centuries of persecution, warfare and sectarianism. It is a powerful ritual of Shi'ite unity - one that the Sunni Taliban leadership attempted to curtail during their reign in Kabul...
...speed and level of chaos in Iraq is picking up fast. An apocalyptic cult came uncomfortably close to taking Najaf, one of Shi'a Islam's most holy cities, and murdering Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Sistani is the neo-cons' favorite quietist Shi'a cleric, the man who was supposed to keep Iraq's Shi'a in line while we went about nation building. And then, on Sunday, Iran's ambassador to Baghdad told the New York Times that Iran is in Iraq to stay, whether the Bush Administration likes...
...Baghdad who runs convoys from Kuwait every day and asked him just how much damage. "Let me put it this way," he said. "In Basra today the currency is the Iranian toman, not the Iraqi dinar." He said his convoys now are forced to pay a 40% surcharge to Shi'a militias and Iraqi police in the south, many of whom are affiliated with IRGC...