Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq rarely agree on the exact sighting of the crescent moon that marks the beginning of Eid.

But this year even Shiites couldn’t agree among themselves on the start of the three-day holy feast that ends the fasting month of Ramadan.

In many Shiite families, some broke their fasts, others did not, making for strained and confused households.

For years, the Eid was set by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other religious leaders who preside over the shrine at Najaf.

But these days, the Shiites who follow the guidance of other religious leaders celebrated the feast a day earlier than Sistani. They marked it on Wednesday, and Sistani followers on Thursday.

Shiites have become quite stubborn about the question. At least one man chased his wife through the house, trying to make her break her fast. She refused for an hour, then relented. She was angry at him for the rest of the day.

Abu Ali, a Sistani follower, said: "I fasted on Wednesday, but the issue ignited a debate inside my family on who was right or wrong. There was a big quarrel. I ended the debate in my family, but some of them started yelling at each other."

It is increasingly a sensitive topic, and one man told me that the bickering “has caused me to lose my anticipation and taste for the Eid.”

When I was writing this blog, a group of men told me: “If you write about this, we will show this story to bad guys.”

It is strange to me that writing about a holy day can get one into trouble.

— Usama Redha in Baghdad

Photo credit: Associated Press

Marines are returning to Camp Pendleton as major responsibility for the U.S. mission in Anbar province shifts to Marine units from other bases. The process will take several months.

On Saturday night, 170-plus Marines and sailors from the 1st Intelligence Battalion, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force returned after a seven-month deployment to Fallouja and other farflung outposts in the sprawling province.

The troops came home to a joyous welcome from family members. It was a night for good news: the troops are confident that the U.S. is winning the war. And more importantly, the battalion did not have a single fatality or serious injury.

"I've been feeling great, and now I'm even better," said Keri Palmisano as she spotted her husband, Sgt. Matt Palmisano, returning from his second deployment.

-- Tony Perry at Camp Pendleton

Photo: Sgt. Matt Palmisano and wife Keri. Credit: Tony Perry / Los Angeles Times

By Saif Rasheed in Baghdad

As a tradition during the feast of Eid, my family used to visit the homes of relatives and relax amid the wide gardens at the social Hunting Club in Baghdad's Mansour district.

Then came the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and many of my relatives fled the country.

These days, with fewer family members to visit, we find ourselves spending more time at the Hunting Club. It is protected from gunfire, serves alcohol and steers conversations away from sectarian politics. 

The Hunting Club is different from what it was just a year or two ago. Security is better in Iraq.

Talk about provocative.

Not only did Venezuela's foreign minister reiterate today that Russia and his nation would conduct joint war games in Caribbean waters just a few hundred miles from America's shores later this year, he also chose an interesting venue to emphasize the news, just as Russian ships entered the Atlantic Ocean: the Islamic Republic of Iran, where he was hobnobbing with top Iranian officials.

At a joint press conference with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki today, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro told reporters that in November and December 2008, a contingent of the Russian fleet will come to Venezuelan waters to conduct war exercises.

He also said that Iran and Venezuela were tightening bilateral relations "on a daily basis" in order to become role models for other developing countries (and, presumably, any country with an ax to grind against the U.S.).

An intriguing morsel about the mysterious leader of a ferocious militant group has been floating around the Lebanese and Syrian media this weekend.

According to a report in the Arab-language Syrian newspaper Al Liwaa, Syrian officials captured the leader of the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Fatah al Islam two months ago in Syria.

The report, summarized in English here, says that Shaker Abssi, a former Libyan air force pilot turned radical Islamist, was captured in the poor Meliha district of southern Damascus and hauled off to prison.

Of Palestinian descent, Abssi, now about 53 years old, has led a storied life.

A panel of experts assembled by Israel's most powerful television channel honored Israeli Mossad chief Meir Dagan as the nation's "man of the year" for, among other things, killing Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyah in the Syrian capital in February, according to a recent report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Up until now, Israel has publicly refused to acknowledge any role in the car bomb blast that killed Mughniyah, who was suspected of masterminding attacks on Israeli targets around the world and was believed to have been the brains behind the Hezbollah militia's surprise performance in the 2006 war with Israel.

Many in Syria and Lebanon suspect the Jewish state's security services had a hand in the assassination.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created a kind of building boom as the Fisher House Foundation and its financial partners build facilities across the country to accommodate families of wounded military personnel who are undergoing medical treatment.

In 2006, the foundation opened a house (above) near the Veterans Affairs Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Palo Alto. In a few weeks a Fisher House will open in Dallas, and a few months later one will open adjacent to the VA hospital in West Los Angeles.

Projects for 2008, according to the foundation's website, www.fisherhouse.org, include houses in West Roxbury, Mass.; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Elgin Air Force Base, Fla.; and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Begun in 1991, the foundation's goal is to provide free accommodations for family members as military personnel receive medical treatment.

On Friday, military personnel and foundation officials gathered at the Naval Medical Center San Diego for the grand opening of the 41st Fisher House, the second at the medical center. The Navy will provide maintenance and management of the 8,000-square-foot, 12-suite house.

New Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni continues to shuttle back and forth among her fellow Israeli politicians seeking to build a governing coalition and assume the mantle of Prime Minister.

On Wednesday night, she met once again with Labor Party chief Ehud Barak.

Livni has about a month left to to pull things together, and negotiations have proceeded at a leisurely pace so far thanks to the interruption of a spate of Jewish Holidays; Rosh Hashana just ended and Yom Kippur comes next week.

Now you can put yourself in Livni's shoes, thanks to the build-your-own coalition game  on the website of  Israel's Haaretz daily newspaper.

Driven by a desire to correct misconceptions about the Muslim Brotherhood, Ibrahim Houdaiby, a 25-year-old activist with Egypt’s largest Islamic organization, tapped into the blogsphere almost two years ago. Yet, this is not to assume that his job is restrictively doing public relations for the brotherhood. On the contrary, Houdaiby, along with other Muslim Brotherhood bloggers, has emerged as a critical voice of the group’s conservatism and political shortsightedness.

“This is a very critical moment for the Muslim Brotherhood. The group is going through a new phase as the old leaders are aging,” said Houdaiby, the grandson of the group’s former supreme Guide Ma’moun Houdaiby. “Inside the group, there is a different generation that expresses itself through blogs and seeks to play an active role in changing society.”

“Blogging has paved the way for several positive things inside the group. I think the response to this self-criticism proved and still proves that this is not being widely accepted within the group. Being part of the Egyptian society, the Muslim Brotherhood has the same illnesses of the society including the low level of tolerance.”

The young Islamist, a graduate of the American University in Cairo, is also concerned about building bridges with the West. His fluency in English allows him to promote his opinion pieces in Western publications such as the British Guardian, Common Grounds and the World Politics Review. In less than six months, he attended two cross-cultural conferences in the U.S. that discussed the nature and future of Islamism in the region.

The congressional delegation from Hawaii has joined several Southern California representatives and a Latino veterans group in calling for President Bush to overrule his secretary of Defense and award the Medal of Honor posthumously to Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates turned down the Marine Corps' recommendation for Peralta amid contradictory evidence about whether he was already clinically dead when an insurgent hurled a grenade at Marines during the fight for Fallouja in November 2004.

Marines who were there insist Peralta smothered the grenade, saving their lives. But faced with a medical opinion that a friendly-fire gunshot seconds earlier was probably instantly fatal to Peralta, Gates instead approved the Navy Cross, the second highest award for Marines.

In a letter to President Bush, Hawaii's two senators and two House members ask for a reconsideration "unless a strong case can be made that demonstrates his [Peralta's] actions were definitely unintentional."

Leaders of Lebanon's American-backed March 14 coalition have publicly voiced fears that Syria is planning to launch an invasion of their country on the pretext of clamping down on Islamic extremists based in the northern seaside city of Tripoli.

Security officials in Lebanon and Syria have accused such militant groups of responsibility for a pair of attacks in Tripoli and Damascus that have killed at least 24 people over the last week. Syrian President Bashar Assad has complained that northern Lebanon has become a hotbed for extreme Islamic groups.

The attacks followed Syria's decision to amass what some describe as thousands of troops along the Lebanese frontier. Damascus says it was to interdict smuggling. But former President Amin Gemayel, leader of the Christian Ketayeb movement said the troop deployment was “not innocent." 

Meanwhile, Saad Hariri, leader of the Sunni Future movement, accused Damascus of being responsible for the violence. He accused Syria of “infiltrating extremists to north Lebanon to carry out terrorist attacks targeting the Lebanese army and civilians."

Samir Geagea, leader of the Christian Lebanese Forces movement, went even further, saying that Assad was laying the groundwork for a return to Lebanon, which his military was forced to leave after a prolonged occupation ended in 2005.

In a television interview, he said Assad's charge that north Lebanon poses a threat to Syria's security is aimed at "setting the atmosphere for Syrian intervention in Lebanon."

Happy birthday to us! 

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Babylon & Beyond, the Los Angeles Times' Middle East blog.

When we first started the blog, we weren't sure what Babylon would end up being.

The blog was unique. Times correspondents in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut and Tehran and even the U.S. would write about people and events in the Middle East that don't get much coverage in the newspapers. They would put it all into one forum.

In the end, it would concentrate on tensions between the West and Islam, between secular aspirations and the call of religion, as well as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights and the war in Iraq.

In less than a year, Babylon joined the ranks of the top 5,000 blogs in the world, according to Technorati, the blog search engine and ranking service.

Babylon has been cited on blogs run by media outlets ranging from the Huffington Post to the Hollywood Reporter, from Wired to Foreign Policy, as well as National Public Radio.

It's been a praised as an "excellent" blog by Susan MacDougall, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Policy Association, a New York think tank.

And even erstwhile critics praise it for covering "myriad topics that rarely receive any coverage" and "taking notice" of controversial events that others ignore.

It's even been gently lampooned (at right) by a website making fun of the Los Angeles Times.

We've tried to increase our use of original video and photos. We've also built a blog roll that's not just an afterthought, but a regularly updated compendium of some of the best sources of commentary and news from and about the Middle East.

We've received thousands of comments from you, our readers, and always want more. Please keep posting your thoughts and reactions to the blog posts, and send along any ideas for improving the blog, what you'd like to see less of or more, to latimesmiddleeast@gmail.com.

— The reporters and editors of Babylon & Beyond

A pretrial hearing Wednesday at Camp Pendleton got a brief reminder of the bloody nature of the Marines' battle with insurgents in Fallouja in November 2004.

Defense attorneys for Sgt. Ryan Weemer want to be able to call Sgt.  Maj. Brad Kasal as a character witness during the court-martial. Weemer is charged with murder for allegedly killing a prisoner Nov. 9 in the first hours of the battle.

Kasal was not with Weemer that day, but the two were among the Marines three days later who fought what has become known as the battle of Hell House.

Kasal was wounded by seven AK-47 rounds and 40 pieces of hot shrapnel and later was awarded the Navy Cross for saving the lives of Marines despite his grievous injuries. Weemer was wounded three times and also lauded for bravery.

When he was asked to describe how vicious the fighting was, Kasal said the battle in and around the house went on for two hours. Finally the U.S. called in an airstrike to reduce the house to rubble.

Still, Kasal said, Marines spotted an insurgent sticking his arm out of the rubble, preparing to hurl a grenade.

"That was the type of enemy and the type of battle it was," Kasal said.

Although his time with Weemer was brief, Kasal is confident that he knows him, he said. "You can tell more about a man in five minutes in combat than you can during two years in peacetime."

For an account of the legal wrangling between prosecutors and defense attorneys at the hearing, read this.

-- Tony Perry at Camp Pendleton

Photo: Then-1st Sgt. Brad Kasal, center, being helped out of Hell House. Credit: Lucian M. Read

Things have been quiet on the Palestinian end lately, thanks to Ramadan.

The Muslim holy month of fasting usually means shorter days, lower energy levels, lots of cheap plastic lanterns and a host of nightly social obligations. As a result, most serious  business  simply gets pushed until after the Eid al Fitr celebration.

The Eid started Tuesday, and many are predicting that events will begin to ramp up on the Palestinian end soon after. But just what direction those events will go depends on whom you ask.

Egypt plans to resume its on-and-off efforts to bring the feuding Palestinian factions together. A delegation from the Islamic group Hamas, which defeated its rival Fatah faction in January 2006 parliamentary elections, will travel to Cairo on Oct. 8 for talks expected to continue through the month.

Hamas and Fatah coexisted for several months in a unity government that collapsed last summer, leaving Hamas running a pariah ministate in the Gaza Strip and Fatah controlling the West Bank and Palestinian Authority with U.S. and Israeli backing.

Dust blew out of the desert and into Baghdad. It whirled around the sheep standing on a corner, eating grass, waiting to be sold. A man arrived in a small truck. He got out and waded into the sheep, pulling at their wool, feeling their sides, lifting their front legs and checking their bellies. It looked like he was dancing with them.

He chose one and hauled it away from the others. The sheep fought. The man pushed it aside, spotting a fatter one hiding in the herd. He carried it to the back of his truck, hooves clattering metal, the door slamming shut. The man paid for the sheep. He smiled. It was the eve of the Eid for Shiite Muslims in Iraq -- the end of 30 days' fasting.

It seemed normal. A man went to the market to buy his family's feast. He praised God. But he drove home through Army checkpoints, blast walls and barbed wire. And news that, although Iraq's casualties are dropping, some people would not live to break their fast -- a car bomb in the city of Balad 80 kilometers north of Baghdad exploded near a shrine, killing three and wounding 30.

Jeffrey Fleishman in Baghdad

An Iraqi boy with his sheep. Associated Press 

The official in charge of guarding against fraud and forgery in Iran's upcoming presidential elections says he submitted a phony Oxford law degree as evidence of his qualifications for the job.

Iranian Interior Minister Ali Kordan, an ally of hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, admitted in a letter to his boss on Saturday that an honorary degree he claimed he received from Oxford was fake, according to a Farsi-language report by Iran's Fars News Agency that appeared Monday.

He said he had been duped by an intermediary who had given him the degree. According to his letter, he submitted his qualifications eight years ago to an "an agency in Tehran for English-language affairs" that represents Oxford University.

He said he never doubted the authenticity of the degree, though it was filled with spelling and grammatical mistakes, until lawmakers began questioning his qualifications last summer. Now, he wants to pursue the guy who granted him the degree, though he doesn't name him. Here's his version of events:

Father Paul J. Shaughnessy has a unique congregation: spread out over 32,000 square miles in Iraq's Anbar province, about the size of South Carolina.

Shaughnessy serves troops of all religions in numerous outposts in the far-flung province as the Catholic chaplain for the Marines' Regimental Combat Team 5. At the mega-base at Al Asad, a Mass may attract a hundred or more Marines, sailors, soldiers and others; at a tiny outpost on the Syrian border, he recently performed Mass for a single Marine.

Now in his fourth deployment to Iraq, Shaughnessy, a Jesuit, keeps on the move: by Osprey (when available), by regular helicopter (when necessary) and sometimes by slow-moving overland convoys (done at night as part of a U.S. policy to give back the roads to Iraqis.)

The goal, Shaughnessy said in a telephone interview, is presence. The more times the troops see him, the more comfortable they are, more liable to open up with the issues that bother them, the less reluctant to discuss faith.

"When you're with them all the time, you're not as threatening," he said. "They're not worried you're going to hit them with religion."

The Jewish new year celebration Rosh Hashana, which started Monday and ends Wednesday night, is meant to be a time of self-reflection and atonement for prior sins.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to be taking that requirement quite seriously lately.

Olmert, who resigned about 10 days ago but remains as a caretaker until a new government forms, has been on a self-reflection and atonement kick lately.  In the process he has issued harsh critiques of Israeli political psychology and confessed to the wrongness of some of the policies he held dear during a 35-year political career.

In an interview published Monday in the Yediot Aharanoth newspaper, Olmert flatly stated that Israel  would have to give up the vast majority of the occupied West Bank and accept the division of Jerusalem in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

Calling it "a decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed,” Olmert all but apologized for his long-standing opposition to any division of Jerusalem. “For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at the reality in all its depth.”

He went on to state that Israel should give the Golan Heights back to Syria in order to achieve peace there and spoke out harshly against any local sentiment to preemptively attack Iranian nuclear sites.

The bomb that killed five people Monday morning in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli employed the same design as an August 13 attack on a bus in the same city that killed at least 12, most of them soldiers.

That's according to a ranking security official in northern Lebanon. He spoke to the Los Angeles Times on condition of anonymity.

He said the weapon was a small explosive charge surrounded by nails and ball bearings, meant to inflict maximum casualties. The official said the explosive charge was concealed under a civilian vehicle and likely activated by remote control, just like the August blast.

“The perpetrator is one,” he said. "The same exact method and technique was used in the previous attack."

Iran has managed to escape sanctions, but it didn't walk away completely unscathed from the latest United Nations General Assembly meeting.

The U.N. Security Council over the weekend passed a largely symbolic resolution against Iran for its refusal to stop producing enriched uranium, a key step in a certain type of nuclear weapons program, as well as in producing fuel for peaceful power generation.

The five-paragraph resolution reaffirmed four previous resolutions containing three sets of sanctions and urged Iran to comply with U.N. demands "without delay."

Of course Iran was flabbergasted.

Its office at the U.N. issued a news release calling the unanimous move "unfortunate" and an "unpleasant surprise" for the whole world. Iran downgraded its participation in an International Atomic Energy Agency conference set to begin today, a reminder that it could also boot U.N. arms inspectors out of the country if it's pushed too hard.

But the resolution fell far short of the harsh punitive sanctions the U.S. and Israel wanted. With veto-wielding Russia virtually ruling out the possibility of even mild sanctions, it was the best deal they could get, affirming the Bush administration's ninth-inning conversion to the type of painstaking multilateral consensus-building it decried during its first years in power.

The shock waves from the biggest terrorist attack in Syria in more than two decades continue to rattle the region.

Diplomats from all over the world, including United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon and the U.S. State Department, condemned the Saturday morning car bomb explosion, which left at least 17 people dead and 14 injured near a security and intelligence office in a crowded residential neighborhood that is also along the way to an important Shiite Muslim shrine.

London's Asharq Alawsat newspaper, a less-than-credible mouthpiece for Saudi Arabia's royal family, said the bombing took place near a building identified as the Palestinian branch of Syrian military intelligence. It cited unnamed sources as saying that one victim, and perhaps the target, was a high-ranking intelligence officer. The report was quoted by Israeli media.

But even a Syrian opposition group prone to espousing conspiracy theories discounted that possibility on Sunday, saying that the "chance that a high-ranking officer may have been killed in the blast is very slim."

One of Egypt’s most outspoken newspaper editors was sentenced to two months in prison today for publishing rumors in 2007 that President Hosni Mubarak was ill and near death.

Ibrahim Issa, a bespectacled editor with a sharp tongue, said he was ready to begin his jail term. It wasn’t clear when that might occur; the Journalists Syndicate has filed a petition asking that the sentence be delayed until the case has been heard by Egypt’s highest appeals court.

“The verdict opens the door of hell,” said Issa. “It deals a blow to all illusions of a free press.”

The editor of the independent Al Dustour, Issa is a colorful, puckish critic of Mubarak’s nearly 27-year regime and of the ruling National Democratic Party. His writing has chafed the business and political elite for years, and his time has often been divided between his editor’s office and Cairo’s musty courtrooms.

Issa articles in 2007 suggested that Mubarak’s health was deteriorating, that he slipped into comas and that he traveled to France for medical treatment. Issa was charged with “publishing false information and rumors” that threatened national security and spurred an investor flight of hundreds of millions of dollars from the Egyptian economy.

By questioning the faith of Shiites and warning against their attempts at invading Sunni countries, prominent religious scholar Yusuf Qaradawi reignited a new sectarian war of words across the Middle East.

Earlier this month, the Egyptian-born scholar said in an interview with a local newspaper: "Shiites are Muslims, but they are heretics. The threat they pose lies in their attempts to invade the Muslim world."

His statement provoked ripostes from top Shiite clerics in Lebanon and Iran. In the meantime, the sectarian rift was furiously played out in cyberspace. On the website of the Arabic Radio of Iran, several respondents voiced their outrage.

"You should incite Muslims against American and Israeli invasions and western hegemony over the Muslim world rather than incite them blindly against fellow Muslims. I pity you and would like to give you a piece of advice: Don't be a puppet in the hands of the Americans and the Israelis. Be more attentive to the Ummah's interests," wrote a respondent who identified himself as Mahmoud M. on the forum.

A Saudi respondent who identified himself as Hussein wrote: "May God reward our respected Shiekh."

On the website of the pan-Arab, Saudi-owned Al Sharq al Awsat daily, some Arabs hailed the statement made by the Qatar-based sheik. "You did a great job, may God bless you for your smart stand. Shiite doctrines pose the most serious threat to Islam," wrote Abdullah from Qatar.

— Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo

Photo: Yusuf Qaradawi  Credit: BBC

When the Marines and Navy Seabees erected a floating bridge over the Euphrates River near the farming community of Baghdadi in May, it was hailed as a leap forward for the U.S. and the Iraqis.

And a thumb in the eye to the insurgents who want to keep communities in Anbar province isolated from each other.

With the Walid Bridge open, commerce could flourish and Iraqi security forces could respond to problems on either side of the river. Otherwise, the closest bridge was 40 miles away.

But heavy algae in the Euphrates soon caused the new bridge's supports to sink. The bridge developed a wobble and a curve. It could still be used but not as it was planned.

So Marines from the Camp Pendleton-based Regional Combat Team 5, along with Iraqi army engineers, were back at the bridge this week, using an excavator and a backhoe to dig holes to provide additional anchors.

While the algae was the enemy of the day, thoughts of insurgents were not far away. Marines with M-16s provided security for the flak-vest-wearing Marines and Iraqis working on both sides of the river.

-- Tony Perry, San Diego

Photo: Marines at the repair job on the Walid Bridge. Credit: Lance Cpl. Paul Torres

The chief of the United Nations arms control agency dropped a bomb about Syria today at the end of a big week-long meeting in Vienna.

Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told his board of directors that the nuclear inspectors' pointman in Syria had been assassinated, according to two sources, a diplomat and an IAEA official, attending the meeting.

ElBaradei's cryptic comment came at the end of his presentation, when he suddenly said the agency's "interlocutor" in Damascus had been killed. He didn't elaborate, But his statement implied that this killing had slowed down the IAEA's investigation into U.S. and Israeli allegations that Syria was building a plutonium factory out in its eastern hinterlands with the help of North Korean engineers.

According to the diplomat, nobody in else in the room appeared surprised by the announcement about the assassination. Speculation in Vienna was that ElBaradei must have been talking about the assassination of Brig. Gen. Mohammed Suleiman, at a beach resort in the northern port city of Tartus, in early August.