The world's leading Shia Moslem scholar, Abdolqassem al-Khoei, was buried in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf at a ceremony attended by a large crowd.
Abbas, the schoolteacher in An Najaf, says he rarely risks listening to his short-wave anymore.
The $120-million restoration program also calls for the conservation of other small palaces in the western desert, not far from the Shiite Moslem shrines at Karbala and Najaf 100 miles south of Baghdad, the capital.
Another Defense Department official added that it would be a "good assumption" that Iran, which fought an eight-year war with Iraq, was involved in some of the turmoil, particularly in An Najaf.
The organization's roots are in 1969, when plans for a militant movement were made in Najaf, Iraq, where Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lived after the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi sent him into exile.
During the recent Shiite holiday of Ashura, the state banned any mention in Najaf or Kerbala mosques of the 7th-century martyr Hussein, whom Shiites revere as a symbol of struggle against authority.