Here’s another account of that firefight near Najaf. The cult was made up of “a diverse cadre of Sunni, Shiite, Afghan and other foreign gunmen.”
The current and eddies contained in a great religious system like Islam (or Christianity or Judaism, for that matter) operate by logics that are elusive and sometimes close to impossible for outsiders to understand. But I still get the sense we’re being sold a bill of goods about what happened here.
Late Update: This story in the Times gives what seems like a more plausible explanation. This was a ‘Shi’a’ group in the broad sense of the word but a dissident one and one which the dominant Shi’a authorities and clerics did not view as genuinely Shi’a. According to the Times the governor of the province described the group as “‘exterior,’ but not in its ‘core.'”
