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Byline: Scott Johnson (With Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad)
A portrait of an angry Moqtada al-Sadr greeted visitors to the Imam Ali Mosque in the holy city of Najaf. The militant Shiite cleric and hundreds of armed followers were effectively holding the gold-domed shrine--and the city around it--hostage last week. U.S. forces didn't dare get too close for fear of damaging one of Iraq's most sacred sites. The area inside the American cordon, nearly a mile across, was a virtual no man's land. One of the few Western journalists to venture there was photographer Laurent Van der Stockt, on assignment for NEWSWEEK. He filed this report:
Most of the inhabitants have fled. The few remaining civilians take to the streets when the shelling pauses, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch, although snipers make the...
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