Saturday, August 29, 2009 NAJAF: Thousands of Iraqis took to the streets of Najaf on Saturday for the funeral of powerful Shiite politician Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, as his body arrived in the southern shrine city.Hakim's coffin, draped in an Iraqi flag, was earlier paraded in the nearby holy Shiite city of Karbala, where crowds also gathered ahead of a funeral ceremony expected to take place in Najaf around 3.00 pm (1200 GMT).Hakim, 60, who died in a Tehran hospital on Wednesday after a 28-month battle against lung cancer, was hailed as "leader of the fight" against the tyrannical reign of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, when his body arrived home on Friday.The former head of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), Iraq's largest Shiite political party, was one of the principal leaders in exile of the opposition to Saddam, who waged a devastating 1980-88 war against Iran.In 1982, Hakim helped to establish an opposition movement in Iran against Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime and only returned to Iraq following the US-led invasion of 2003.A scion of one of the traditional leading families among Iraq's Shiite majority, Hakim took over the leadership of his party in August 2003 after his brother Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim was assassinated in Najaf.Their father, Grand Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim, was one of Shiite Islam's top spiritual leaders between 1955 and 1970.The SIIC swept Shiite areas in the first provincial elections after the invasion, but in polls seven months ago the party suffered major losses.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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