At the height of the Iraqi insurgency, Dr. Thamer al-Assafi, a former Iraqi commando combat veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who later served as a cleric and a faculty member at Al-Anbar University, turned against “foreign Arabs” who attempted to control the local mosques. The power grab by outsiders prompted al-Assafi and likeminded clerics to use their sermons to incite fellow Anbaris against al Qaeda in Iraq. For this, he explains, “We lost many innocent people. Some of them were loaded down with blocks and put in the river. Some of them were taken out to the desert and beheaded.”
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