Word: ayatullah
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...European governments for fabricating the post-election unrest in an attempt to stage a coup d'état. Now the Iranian government is finding it more and more tempting to press the hot button of conflict with the West. (See a pictorial history of the legacy of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...already Iran's largest in the region. And the close ties between Iran and Syria were visible last month at a Quds Day celebration at the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus in September. The holiday has its origins in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution in Iran, when Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to be a day to protest the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. The keynote speaker at the celebration in Damascus was the personal representative of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, who thanked Assad for his support...
Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini's death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards' fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves...
...with Ahmadinejad, the real headline was his apparent cluelessness. It was almost as if Obama's announcement had taken him by surprise. It is well known that Ahmadinejad doesn't have operational control over the nuclear program or Iranian foreign policy - that resides with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei - but the exact extent of his powers, beyond management of the domestic economy, remains a mystery. He did not seem very powerful to us. His answers to our questions were sometimes opaque, often blatantly false, though not confrontational. Almost every question brought forth a flurry of crib notes hastily scribbled...
...state news agencies have launched an all-out media war against him, questioning his political credentials and suggesting he has been colluding with the "manipulators" - that is, opposition leaders like Mousavi and former President Mohammed Khatami. If history is any guide, the regime likely has the upper hand here. Ayatullah Khomeini's most promising son, Ahmad, died under suspicious circumstances at age 49. He had become critical of his father's successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, in the mid-1990s...