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June 26, 2004
Iraqi resistance condemns the car bombings
Something pretty interesting happened in response to the wave of car bombings that killed over a hundred people in Iraq last Thursday. Many of the visible, Iraqi faces of the resistance condemned the bombings loudly and scathingly. Everyone from Sunni clerics to fighters in Fallujah to Moqtada Sadr said that they viewed the attacks as indefensible, shedding innocent blood and giving an excuse to the occupiers.
This is a pretty significant development. Abu Musab Zarqawi’s brand of politics is a serious danger for any future hope Iraq might have to become a tolerant, independent and hopefully democratic nation. If it ever took hold, it could actually spark the civil war that the media is fond of declaring as the reason why we “can’t cut and run” -- even though it seems as our presence there is now the main reason Zarqawi can exist and, perhaps, find a base. Most victims of violent Islamic extremism have always been other muslims, as in case of Algeria, and Iraq has so far been no different. While the gruesome beheadings of westerners have gotten a lot of media attention --and that was clearly the intention of the killers-- stories about car-bombings victims by the dozen or gunned-down cleaning women barely the news cycle.
Foes of U.S. in Iraq Criticize InsurgentsKey Iraqi opponents of the U.S. occupation expressed unease Friday over the wave of insurgent attacks that killed more than 100 Iraqis a day earlier, and rejected efforts by foreign guerrillas to take the lead in the insurgency and mate it with the international jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden.
The objections -- from anti-U.S. Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders, including rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah -- arose in part from revulsion at the fact that victims of the car bombings and guerrilla assaults in six cities and towns Thursday were overwhelmingly Iraqis. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the fight against U.S. occupation forces risked being hijacked by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom U.S. officials describe as a paladin in bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"We do not need anyone from outside the borders to stand with us and spill the blood of our sons in Iraq," Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, a Sunni cleric with a wide following, declared in his Friday sermon at Umm al Qurra mosque in Baghdad.
...
"Which religion allows anyone to kill more than 100 Iraqis, destroy 100 families and destroy 100 houses?" raged Samarrae in his sermon. "Who says so? Who are those people who do this? Where did they come from? . . . It is a conspiracy to defame the reputation of the Iraqi resistance by wearing its dress and using its name falsely. These people hurt the Iraqis and Iraq, giving the occupier an excuse to stay longer."
In a similar vein, a group of masked fighters in Fallujah stood before Reuters television cameras and read a statement insisting that the city's violent struggle against surrounding U.S. Marines is being carried out by Fallujans, not Zarqawi or other foreign fighters.
"The American invader forces claim that Zarqawi, and with him a group of Arab fighters, are in our city," said one of the heavily armed men, reading from a paper. "We know that this talk about Zarqawi and the fighters is a game that the American invader forces are playing to strike Islam and Muslims in the city of mosques, steadfast Fallujah."Shortly after their declaration, the U.S. military launched precision weapons against what it called a Zarqawi safe house, the third such strike in less than a week.
In Baqubah, where scores of fighters proclaiming allegiance to Zarqawi attacked police stations and government buildings in Thursday's offensive, clerics called on the faithful not to support such attacks. The attackers, they said in their Friday sermons, were foreigners attacking Iraqis.
"This is the first time we have heard the minaret broadcast support for the Iraqi government," said Edward Peter Messmer, the occupation authority's coordinator for the Baqubah region, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. "And it couldn't come at a better time."
Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has fought U.S. troops in the Sadr City slum in eastern Baghdad and in Najaf, 90 miles to the south, ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to "deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness."
...
Aws Khafaji, a cleric in Sadr's militantly political stream of Shiite Islam, disowned Thursday's violence even more clearly in a sermon at the Hikma mosque in Sadr City.
"We condemn and denounce yesterday's bombings and attacks on police centers and innocent Iraqis, which claimed about 100 lives," he said. "These are attacks launched by suspects and lunatics who are bent on destabilizing the country and ruining the peace so that the Iraqi people will remain in need of American protection."
Posted by zeynep at June 26, 2004 06:37 PM
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