A rchive Date
[ 26-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/04/25/73167-ap.html
Iraq's clerics call for U.S. withdrawal
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS
Fri, April 25, 2003
NASIRIYAH, Iraq (AP) - Hundreds of worshippers sat cross-legged on a wide boulevard in this war-shattered city Friday and listened to a cleric tell them that Iraqis must unite and prepare for creation of an Islamic state. Across Iraq during the main day of Muslim prayers, clerics spoke to their followers about the need to come together following the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein. And some urged the United States to leave Iraq.
"It is a happy day for us because we can pray freely. It has been a long time," said Mohamed Ghalib, 22, a student who was among the 2,000 white-clad worshippers filling part of a main thoroughfare in Nasiriyah, the southern city that saw some of the fiercest fighting during the war.
At one Baghdad mosque, worshippers listened to a white-turbaned cleric, Abdel-Hadi al-Muhammadawi, demand that foreign "occupiers" leave Iraq, an obvious reference to the United States and Britain. Then the cleric, standing with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in front of him, recounted a tale of imprisonment and torture at the hands of Saddam's henchmen.
"They tortured my son in front of my cell to put pressure on me. They tore apart my turban," the sheik said before bursting into tears. Hundreds of his flock wept along with him.
Clerics from both of Islam's main groupings, Sunnis and Shiites, called Friday for unity and equality in a new Iraq. But the Shiite messages are the ones attracting the most attention these days.
The Shiites, long repressed under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, comprise 60 per cent of the country's population of 24 million and they are fast filling a power vacuum left by Saddam's ouster.
"We have to be ready in the long term to establish our own Islamic state," Asaad al-Nasseri, a prominent Shiite cleric who just returned from exile in Syria, told the crowd in Nasiriyah.
Iraqi Shiites are organizing local committees, doling out funds to pay salaries, collecting looted property and sending militias to secure hospitals and electric plants. The growing Shiite power is raising concerns that some may try to install a theocracy in Iraq like the one next door in Shiite-dominated Iran.
In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld indicated Washington will not allow that. "If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn't going to happen," he said.
Although Shiites and the Sunnis often disagree, the sermons in Baghdad's mosques on Friday were of a piece, calling on the faithful to pull together in restoring the disorderly and troubled country.
Sheik Moayed al-Aathami, who led the prayers at the Sunni Abi Hanifah mosque in the neighbourhood of Azamiya, said "we want brotherly people, who help each other in times of difficulties." "We want Muslim people equal in rights and duties: Kurds, Arabs and minorities. We want Muslim people with no sectarian sensitivities," al-Aathami said.
In Baghdad's al-Mansour neighbourhood, Shiite Muslims held prayers at the al-Rahman mosque, still under construction, and chanted in one voice "Muslims. Not Sunnis or Shiites."
In Nasiriyah, Al-Nasseri said clerics should play a constructive role in postwar Iraq without overstepping their bounds. "We have to preserve this country by respecting the professionals and not interfere in their work," he said. As an example, he said clerics can help re-open hospitals without presuming to tell doctors how to treat their patients.
He also urged his followers to end the orgy of looting and lawlessness that has plagued Iraq since the fall of Saddam's government earlier this month. "Looting is forbidden in our religion. The people of Iraq must make it a priority to preserve this property," he said.
During the war, Nasiriyah was the site of fierce resistance from irregular Iraqi units, house-to-house combat, ambushes, friendly fire and civilian casualties, combatants posing as civilians, PoWS, and a daring commando raid.
On Friday, the city, with its blown out brick buildings and bullet-scarred walls, took on some aspects of normalcy. A few stores opened, buses were running and women walked the streets balancing tin water basins or bags of grain on their heads.
Eds: Associated Press correspondent Bassem Mroue contributed to this report from Baghdad.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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