Word: sulaimaniyah
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...took the prestigious but highly symbolic office of the Iraqi presidency, allowing Massoud Barzani to build up a power base back home in Kurdistan. The Change List further eroded the PUK's stature in the region by mounting a significant challenge against the party on its home turf in Sulaimaniyah...
Still, Talabani's move is a brazen attempt to clip Maliki's wings. The Prime Minister "is not budging and remains adamant that creating these councils is legal," Talabani was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah on Monday. "We will go to the federal court to see whether this is indeed the case...
...According to the Shafi'i school [of Islamic law] to which we Kurds belong, circumcision is obligatory for both men and women," explains Mohamed Ahmed Gaznei, chief cleric in the city of Sulaimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan's second city. "The Hanbali [school] says it is obligatory only for men." Personally opposed to female circumcision, Gaznei in 2002 issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for imitation of Hanbali practice. He has since appeared on a short film about FGM shot by a Kurdish filmmaker that WADI medical teams now take with them when visiting villages...
...Look, they even got Osama bin Laden to talk," quips Gula Hama Amin, one of 30 women watching the film in Nura, a village 100 miles north of Sulaimaniyah, referring to Gaznei's luxuriant beard. The others tell her to quiet down. All have been circumcised for reasons hovering somewhere between religious belief and tradition: locals say the food an uncircumcised woman cooks is unclean, or that the operation makes a girl more affectionate to her family...
...three men hailing a taxi late last Wednesday near Sulaimaniyah, a city in northern Iraq close to the Iranian border, didn't look like locals. They wore long, dark beards, for one thing and, though it was past midnight, didn't know where they were going. They first told the driver to take them into the city, then changed their minds and asked to be driven to a secluded suburb. Then they pulled guns on the driver and forced him out. "Do not look back," one of the strangers said, before speeding off. In any other part of the world...