section_path: Persecution of Shia Muslims
section_name: Persecution of Shia Muslims
paragraph_text: Persecution of Shia Muslims
  
  The history of Shia–Sunnī relations has often involved religious discrimination, persecution, and violence, dating back to the earliest development of the two competing sects.At various times throughout the history of Islam, Shia groups and minorities have faced persecution perpetrated by Sunnī Muslims.
  
  Militarily established and holding control over the Umayyad government, many Sunnī rulers perceived the Shias as a threat—both to their political and religious authority. The Sunnī rulers under the Umayyad dynasty sought to marginalize the Shia minority, and later the Abbasids turned on their Shia allies and imprisoned, persecuted, and killed them. The persecution of Shia Muslims throughout history by their Sunnī co-religionists has often been characterized by brutal and genocidal acts. Comprising only about 10–15% of the global Muslim population, Shia Muslims remain a marginalized community to this day in many Sunnī-dominant Arab countries, without the rights to practice their religion and freely organize.
  
  In 1514, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (1512–1520) ordered the massacre of 40,000 Alevis and Bektashi (Anatolian Shia Muslims). According to Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, "Sultan Selim I carried things so far that he announced that the killing of one Shia had as much otherworldly reward as killing 70 Christians." In 1802, the Al Saud - Wahhabi armies of the Ikhwan from the First Saudi State (1727–1818) attacked and sacked the city of Karbala, the Shia shrine in Najaf (eastern region of Iraq) that commemorates the martyrdom and death of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī.
  
  During the rule of Saddam Hussein 's Ba'athist Iraq, Shia political activists were arrested, tortured, expelled or killed, as part of a crackdown launched after an assassination attempt against Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz in 1980. In March 2011, the Malaysian government declared Shia Islam a "deviant" sect and banned Shia Muslims from promoting their faith to other Muslims, but left them free to practice it themselves privately.
  
  The most recent campaign of anti-Shia oppression was the Islamic State organization's persecution of Shias in its territories in Northern Iraq, which occurred alongside the persecution of various religious groups and the genocide of Yazidis by the same organization during the Second Iraq War.