Dawa party vs. Baath party:
Iraq's prime minister was smiling as he boldly signed Saddam Hussein's death warrant.
As the second-in-command of the Shiite Dawa party, Nouri al-Maliki had just closed what may have been the final chapter in a decades-old battle between the Islamic group and Saddam's now outlawed secular Baath party — a war so fierce that it left thousands dead and sent thousands more into exile.
The parties' rivalry dates back more than four decades. The two groups have traditionally held opposing views on how Iraq should be run, with Dawa calling for an Islamic Shiite state, and the Baath party having a secular, pan-Arab ideology.
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Dawa became the ruling party when its leader, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, became interim prime minister after Iraq's first general election in January 2004. A year later, al-Maliki replaced al-Jaafari in the post.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... 78,00.htmlSaddam's hangmen made no effort to hide their allegiance, taunting the deposed Iraqi leader with the name of radical Shi'ite cleric and power broker Muqtada al-Sadr. Afterwards, they danced around Saddam's corpse.
Saddam didn't hide what he thought about them either. At one point, he called them "Persians" — in other words, traitors — and his choice of insult was very revealing. Like Saddam, most Iraqi Sunnis view Sadr as all but a paid-up Iranian agent, and his militia, the Mahdi Army, as an Iranian creation.The Sunnis are convinced that one day, given the opportunity, Sadr will hand Iraq over to Iran. For all the shock Iraq's Sunnis felt on hearing Sadr's name shouted at Saddam's execution, Iranian diplomats might as well have been in attendance.
Just as consequential, for Sunnis and anyone else who knows Iraqi history, Saddam's executioners shouted the name of Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muqtada's father-in-law. Ayatollah Sadr, whom Saddam executed in 1980, is perhaps as responsible as Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini for modern, resurgent Shi'a Islam. Sadr founded the Da'wa Party, a violent, secretive organization committed to the creation of an Iraqi Shi'a Islamic republic — and today a political party that counts none other than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as a member.
Саддама приговорили за то, что он приговорил 148 из Dawa:
Two years later, in Dujail, the Da'wa did try to assassinate Saddam. Saddam's brutal retribution against Dujail is what got him hanged last Saturday.
Dawa атаковала не только Саддама:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9230559/sit ... ek/page/4/And on Dec.17, 1981, in the first massive suicide attack since World War II, a Dawa bomber blew up Iraq’s embassy in Beirut, killing 30 people. In 1983, at a time when Washington and Paris and Kuwait were big Saddam supporters, the Dawa blew up the American and French embassies in Kuwait City, killing six people and wounding 80. The Dawa’s close allies in Hizbullah soon started using suicide attacks against the Israelis, Americans and French in Lebanon. In October 1983 Hizbullah blew up the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.