Word: sunni
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...week the Druze and the Communists, who had renewed an old alliance just last month, had the upper hand. They had pushed the Amal out of Hamra and the low-income Sunni Muslim district of Zarif and had begun shelling Shi'ite gunmen occupying the state television station in the Tallet Khayyat district, on the southern edge of West Beirut...
...plight of the two camps came to light in a shocking request by Sheik Khalil Sharkiyeh, the chief Sunni Muslim clergyman of the Burj el-Barajneh camp. Because of acute food shortages, Sharkiyeh appealed to Muslim scholars for a fatwa, or religious ruling, that would allow starving residents to eat human flesh if that became necessary for survival. Though no such edict was forthcoming, an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose forces are defending the camps, said last week that conditions for the 35,000 besieged Palestinians had grown desperate. "Our people in Burj el-Barajneh have already eaten...
...bloody reminder of the dominant presence in southern Lebanon of the Shi'ites, the Muslims who now make up 40% of the country's population of 3 million. Long an impoverished rural people, Shi'ite followers in Iran and the Arab world split from the dominant Sunni Muslims over doctrinal issues concerning the descendants of the prophet Muhammad. In recent years the Shi'ites have waged a successful struggle for political equality and economic well-being. With success has come unprecedented power, and power has created a cauldron of shifting alliances and abrupt betrayals within their own ranks...
...goal of driving the P.L.O. from southern Lebanon. The well-funded and heavily armed P.L.O. fighters had overrun large parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut, and the Shi'ites were the principal victims of their arbitrary power. The Israeli expulsion of the P.L.O., together with the crushing of its Sunni Muslim allies, created a power vacuum that was quickly filled by the emergent Shi'ites, who have little interest in seeing the Palestinians return...
...later, Berri, who is also Lebanon's Minister of Justice, organized his own show of "justice," though it bore no direct relation to either of last week's explosions. Amal militiamen bound and blindfolded Mohieddin Saleh, 22, a Sunni Muslim they charged with trying to set off a car bomb three months earlier, then took him to a playground near the Rawdat Shahidain Cemetery. As a crowd of 1,000 looked on, Amal executioners stepped up to the prostrate Saleh and pumped seven machine-gun rounds into his face and body. The grisly execution tragically bore out the lament...