The cleric's young men fanned out across the neighborhood, moving from shop to shop, posting the new religious decrees. Printed neatly on white-and-green fliers, the edicts banned vices like "music-filled parties and all kinds of singing."
They proscribed celebratory gunfire at weddings and "the gathering of young men" in front of markets and girls' schools. Also forbidden were the "selling of liquor and narcotic drugs" and "wearing improper Western clothes."Women have been assailed for not wearing a veil or head scarf.
Athletes have been killed for wearing shorts, because some consider it un-Islamic to reveal thighs. Liquor stores have been attacked, and male doctors have been killed for treating female patients. In Sadr's stronghold of Sadr City and other Shiite-dominated areas, Islamic courts deliver strict, homegrown justice.
In early August, a group of armed men walked into Abu Ahmed Jassim's barbershop in southeast Baghdad. They shot dead his 23-year-old brother and another barber, as well as two customers. Before they left, they set a bomb. Jassim arrived an hour later to find the charred carcass of his shop.
Shiite barbers like him practice khite, an ancient way of removing hair from cheeks and eyebrows with twists of a cotton thread. Radical Sunnis consider this ritual, as well as trimming or removing beards, to be prohibited under Islam.
This is what we are dying for in Iraq. So much for Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeldt saying they are spreading democracy in the Middle East. The only way to stop this madness is to throw the Republicans out in Novermber.
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