Iraqi clerics condemn bombers

Washington Post:

As the smoke cleared from a chain of deadly attacks in Iraq, the first signs of unease at the level of destruction and bloodshed emerged Friday among influential Iraqis who advocate resistance against the U.S. occupation but are unwilling to mate their struggle with the international jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden.

The objections -- from Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders who oppose the U.S. role in Iraq, including the rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah -- centered on the car bombings and guerrilla assaults Thursday in six cities in central and northern Iraq that killed more than 100 Iraqis, many of them police officers.

They arose in part from revulsion at the fact that the victims were overwhelmingly fellow Iraqis, including some patients at a hospital in Mosul near a bombed-out police academy. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the struggle against U.S. occupation forces risked being hijacked by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian national whom U.S. officials describe as linked to bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Since being appointed three weeks ago, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and members of his U.S.-sponsored interim government have railed against the car bombings and other attacks, as have U.S. officials. But Friday's show of disgust, announced in mosques and in Sadr's case with flyers calling for cooperation with Iraqi police, marked the first time anti-occupation clerics and fighters took sides against the violence, which Zarqawi increasingly has claimed as his own in Web site announcements widely followed in Iraq.


There are many differences between the US and Zarqawi. The US does not target civilians. The US wants to leave as soon as Iraq has a stable democratic government. Zarqawi kills indiscriminately in order to gain power so he can put the Iraqis under another reign of terror. Even if these clerics are not enlightened enough to see that the US is trying to help Iraq, they seem to be pretty clear on what Zarqawi's motives are.

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