Ping
".....are there certain mosques we should be aware of that are of that affiliation?"
Yes. The ones with Minarets.
they are just about all muslim...
Let God sort them out.
Nice technique to deflect from focusing on the real problem though: they're out to kill us. Let's do more to prevent it.
Well, the concise answer would be, They're all Muslim.
Jihad, per se, evidently is a Shiite concept. However, the aggressive fundamentalism of the Wahabi is Sunni and emanates from Saudia Arabia. The Madrassas that appear to be influential in radicalizing muslim youth are I believe Sunni dominated.
In short the answer is that both sects provide terrorists.
In Iraq they are almost all Sunni and target a lot of Shiites. This whole muslim terrorism thing is becoming more of a cult than anything else. It's like calling Jim Jones group Christian.
In Iraq, they're Sunni.
In Iran, they're shiite.
Please don't squeeze the Charmin.
He always maintained that in Afghanistan the Shiites were the terrorists, the sunni's were fairly peacful. The big problem as he saw it is that no matter which persuasion they are, they're all back in the stone age. Most outside of the cities just don't have the ability to grasp the Modern World.
Hence a lot of religious wackos on both sides.
FWIW.
prisoner6
I saw a book review of a book on suicide bombers. My recollection is that there have been no Iranian Shiite suicide bombers. There may have been Arab Shiite suicide bombers in Israel -- I'm not sure. The vast majority appear to be either Arab Sunnis influenced by the Wahhabi branch of Islam or Pakistani suicide bomber influenced by the Deobandist branch of Islam.
Suicide bombers are not all Muslims. The suicide vest was first used by the woman who killed Rajiv Ghandi in '91. She was a Tamil Tiger and a Hindu. The Tamil Tigers originated and perfected the technique, and they have launched more suicide bomb attacks than any other group.
I saw a book review of a book on suicide bombers. My recollection is that there have been no Iranian Shiite suicide bombers. There may have been Arab Shiite suicide bombers in Israel -- I'm not sure. The vast majority appear to be either Arab Sunnis influenced by the Wahhabi branch of Islam or Pakistani suicide bomber influenced by the Deobandist branch of Islam.
Suicide bombers are not all Muslims. The suicide vest was first used by the woman who killed Rajiv Ghandi in '91. She was a Tamil Tiger and a Hindu. The Tamil Tigers originated and perfected the technique, and they have launched more suicide bomb attacks than any other group.
Shia believe in authority rather than in literalism. That is, the highest appeal to a literalist is to the text of the Koran. The highest appeal to a Shia is to a particular living man regarded as their leader and learned authority. This has been compared to having bishops (theirs are "ayatollahs") compared to every individual with his Koran being his own decision maker. As such, Shia and Sunni fundamentalists have a serious political disagreement over how questions of what is Islamic are decided. But in practice, if a given Shia leader stays close to the text of the Koran in his own rulings and orders, they will both agree on many things. Shia aren't monolithic, though - they follow different exemplars who have different political tacks.
Sistani is an Iraqi moderate for instance, and in power basically, while the lesser Sadr is a young extremist, followed only by a small sect. Montazeri in Iran is for reforms and a freer and more secular state, has excellent Islamic "credentials" and seniority, but little power and is under house arrest, while Khameni is the effective ruler of the country and an extremist. The Iranian extremists support Hezbollah in Lebanon, basically their Shiite terrorist army against Israel. Khomeni was an extremist and ran the Iranian revolution. So there are certainly Shiite terrorists, including ones operating outside of their own countries.
The mainline of Islamic radicalism dates back to the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. They were Sunnis and fundamentalists, but not Wahhabis. Wahhabis took over Arabia around that time, and founded the House of Saud, displacing the Sunni but not Wahhabi descendents of the Sherifs of Mecca. Fundamentalist Islamicists fought with modernizing, secular Arab nationalists (those who speak the Arab language, as distinct from e.g. Turks or Persians) for leadership of anti-western resistence movements through the WW II period and the early cold war. Some of them frankly communist, some of them varieties of fascist in political orientation. The PLO came out of secular terrorist organizations, for example, funded by the Soviet Union. While Hamas is a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization.
So there were Arab terrorists who weren't particularly religious, and Muslim terrorists who weren't Arab or Sunni, but Persian and Shia (in the Iranian revolution e.g.). Political extremism and terrorist violence was used by all of them, it was not restricted to Sunni fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the fundamentalist Sunnis have been gaining in influence over time. They have strong ideological cards - literalism as a source of Islamic identity "plays well" - and funding, coming from oil money and protection rackets. Bin Laden is a Sunni fundamentalist.
In Iraq today, there are terrorist opponents from all of these groups. There are foreign Sunni fundamentalists coming to fight us as part of Bin Laden's jihad. There are domestic secularist Baaths who are basically godless fascists and mere gangsters, from the former ruling party - particularly common among the Sunni minority in the middle of the country, but not particularly religious. That is just the ethnic group Saddam was from and that he favored, made the ruling class in his tyranny. Most of the Shia majority follow Sistani or other moderates and want democracy, because it is putting them in control of the country. Some Shia radicals like Sadr, who is supported by Iran, want to fight the US anyway and don't want a democracy but a theocracy under Shia authority figures, as in Iran.
All of the above fight us and occasionally each other, and several of them (Baathists, external Sunni fundamentalists working for Bin Laden) are trying to foment civil war between the other factions, to make the country ungovernable. Because all they actually agree on is (1) wanting us gone and (2) not wanting a democracy led by moderate Shia in charge of the place. If those failed and power were lying in the street, they'd soon be at each other's throats over who got the "spoils".
The main group trying to internationalize the conflict and attack the west are the Sunni fundamentalists. They do so for internal consumption within the Islamic world, more than for the sake of any effect it might have on us or on our policies. They are trying to look tougher than the other factions, more willing to take on the big bad foreigners. They smear all the other factions as lackies of the west and of the Jews, lukewarm Muslims, and claim a right to lead the Islamic world based on their superior zeal, defiance, bravery, ruthlessness, and the supposed literalist purity of their version of Islam.
I hope that helps.
