Shiite Muslims

On election day, Sheik Wahid Issawi held court in his mudheef, a tribal guesthouse tucked among the family's acres of date groves and rice fields. Relatives filed in, kissed his hand and cheek and asked his guidance on how to vote in Saturday's provincial elections. His answer was simple: Choose the list of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. If Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party proves victorious in Najaf province, the spiritual capital of Shiite Islam, the graying patriarch will have played a key role.

In the glow of a full moon, a U.S. military convoy inched toward a strategic road in Sadr City. The goal: to add to a wall being built to carve out a haven in the Shiite Muslim militia stronghold. But the mission ended before it began. Machine gun fire blasted out from the third floor of a building along the route. A Bradley fighting vehicle fired back, sending a thunderous roar through the neighborhood of middle-class homes and businesses. Then, the lead tank hit a roadside bomb.

Eager to cement the security gains of last year's troop buildup, the U.S. military has shifted its strategy from the streets to the corridors of power in a high-stakes effort to persuade Iraq's wary Shiite leaders to put thousands of predominantly Sunni men, many of them former insurgents, on the government payroll. More than 70,000 members of mostly Sunni Arab groups now work for American forces in neighborhood security programs.

Authorities said they had arrested a teenager who told them he would have been the next suicide bomber sent to target former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had she survived the Dec. 27 attack. The teen, identified as Aitzaz Shah, was arrested Friday in a mountainous region of the North-West Frontier Province and told investigators that he was not in Rawalpindi on the day Bhutto was slain.

Seven people were killed in Iraq's northwest Saturday when a rocket landed amid a gathering of Shiite Muslims marking their most important holiday of the year. The young pilgrims had just completed reenactments of the slaying of the prophet Muhammad's grandson and revered saint, Imam Hussein, when the Katyusha rocket exploded. Another seven people were critically injured in the attack in Tall Afar, 240 miles northwest of Baghdad.

First, the attackers beat the retired Baghdad municipality worker, his wife and their daughter in their home last weekend. Then they beheaded them. The only clear motive people could think of for such brutality was that the dead man had belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. "They didn't care if he was a good or bad person," his cousin Abu Abdullah said a few days later. "His job had required him to be a Baathist. He was never into it like others. He never hurt anyone."

The ayatollah has a simple piece of advice for any Muslim woman being abused by her husband: Hit him back. "A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter- violence as a self-defense measure," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior-most Shiite cleric, wrote in a fatwa late last year that shocked conservative Muslims around the world. Fadlallah long has been considered a leader of the most radical faction of Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.

A potential security crisis loomed Saturday in troubled Diyala province as significant numbers of a U.S.-funded force of Sunni fighters left their posts, demanding the ouster of the provincial police chief. "You can imagine what danger will face the region in the next days," said Abu Talib, commander of 2,000 to 3,000 so-called Sons of Iraq fighters. His men, many of them former insurgents, turned against the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq last year under the Awakening banner.

The 26-year-old Sunni Arab man sat in the restaurant of a fashionable Baghdad hotel, his business suit covering marks where he said a power drill had penetrated his thigh and acid dissolved his calf. The former Iraqi SWAT commander had traveled to Baghdad for meetings with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and other high-ranking officials in which he plans to provide an account of torture he says he endured on the orders of Maj. Gen. Ghanim Quraishi, the Shiite Muslim police chief of Diyala province.

The room seethed with anger as Sunni Arab members of a neighborhood guard force brought in a freed captive, who stood mute amid the raised voices and swirling cigarette smoke. Eyeing a visiting U.S. Army officer, the burly gunmen in camouflage coaxed the man to raise his arms and display the brown shoelaces that bound his wrists. The man, a fuel vendor, said he had been stopped by Shiite guards who demanded to know his sect.