Curfew Imposed On (The Holy City Of) Najaf

From Reuters:

Supporters of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr hold balloons during a protest rally against the Iraqi government and U.S. Military after Friday prayers in Baghdad’s Sadr City April 11, 2008.

Curfew on Iraq’s Najaf as top Sadr aide killed

By Khaled Farhan

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi police imposed a curfew to prevent an outbreak of violence in the southern Shi’ite holy city of Najaf on Friday, after a senior aide to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was shot dead.

Police set up road blocks and drove through the city with loudspeakers ordering shops closed and people off the streets after Riyadh al-Nuri, a top Sadr aide whose sister is married to the cleric’s brother, was gunned down.

Sadr blamed the United States and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government for the slaying.

“This is the hand of the occupier and his successor reaching out traitorously and aggressively against our precious martyr,” the cleric said in a statement. “It is my vow that I will not forget this precious blood.” …

A struggle for power among Shi’ites in the south has involved frequent assassinations over recent years. But the death of someone so close to Sadr risks inflaming those tensions at a time when his militia has been at the centre of an upsurge in violence in Baghdad and throughout the south…

In the early morning hours of Friday Iraqi troops were fired upon when they tried to enter the northern Basra district of Hayaniya, a Mehdi Army stronghold, police said.

A U.S. aircraft retaliated with an air strike that killed six people and wounded one, said British Major Tom Holloway, a spokesman for U.S. and British forces in southern Iraq.

U.S. soldiers operating a drone plane over Sadr City, an eastern Baghdad Shi’ite slum, also fired a Hellfire missile late on Thursday at a group of men carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers, killing six, the U.S. military said…

But in a Mehdi Army statement read over loudspeakers in Sadr City mosques on Thursday night, the militia was defiant.

“They want us to disarm, but they are seeking to take away the dignity and honor of the Iraqi people,” it said. “They want to turn Iraq into another Palestine, but we say to the tyrants that we will not abandon our weapons.”

Street fighting that has been raging in Sadr City since Sunday has eased somewhat in recent days and fewer mortars have been landing in the Green Zone…

Of course it is those damn Masons who are at the bottom of all the trouble.

Still, for some reason one is reminded of the purported words of England’s Henry II, which Wikipedia says were a variation on one of the following:

“Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”
“Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”
“Will no one revenge me of the injuries I have sustained from one turbulent priest?”
“Will none of the knaves eating my bread rid me of this turbulent priest?”
“What a band of loathsome vipers I have nursed in my bosom who will let their lord be insulted by this low-born cleric!”
“What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”

Who knows? Maybe Henry said all of these at one time or another, hoping someone would take the hint.

At any rate, they are all good questions in this case. And the answer is long overdue. 

Maybe some courageous Mason will step forward.

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