Demonstrations praise attacks against occupation forces

CAIRO: Angry crowds gathered at mosques from Cairo to Tehran yesterday, denouncing US-led sieges like those against the central Iraqi city of Fallujah, praising Iraqi attacks on what Arabs see as a foreign occupation force, and blaming Washington for deepening a crisis in a region already torn by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At Cairo’s Al Azhar Mosque, the Sunni Muslim world’s foremost seat of learning, some 500 men surrounded by similar numbers of armour-clad riot police protested following Friday prayers, describing President George W. Bush as “the enemy of God” and demanding their government expel the American and Israeli ambassadors from Egypt.
“Iraqi resistance is defending you and your honour and without this resistance you will find America in Cairo and in Riyadh,” Mustafa Bakri, editor of the weekly Al Osboa newspaper, screamed out at a crowd of worshippers in a warning to Arab rulers.
Television images of the United States’ unrelenting military campaign, particularly in Fallujah, and the increasing resistance facing coalition forces in Iraq are being seen in the homes of millions of Arabs, stoking the flames of an already dismayed region angered by America’s perceived backing of Israel’s conflict against the Palestinians.
“America is carrying out the same actions in Iraq that Israel is carrying out in the occupied (Palestinian) territories – an army leading a war against civilians,” Saudi political analyst Dawood Al Shirian said.
Al Shirian warned the Bush administration that if the war continues, it risks both losing at the polls and increasing the bloodshed in Iraq, with “jihadist (holy war) groups banding together and entering Iraq to help jihadi groups there.”
In Iran, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who heads the powerful Expediency Council advisory body, told worshippers at a Tehran University mosque that “Iraq has now turned into the paradise of terrorists in the world.”
“Now, terrorists in any part of the world who feel insecure find Iraq the best place to be.”
Hisham Youssef, spokesman for the Cairo-based Arab League, echoed similar sentiments, saying the present situation in Iraq offered no hope for stability.
“Things are not progressing in the manner that the Unite States had predicted, with Iraq becoming a model (for regional reform),” Youssef said in reference to Washington’s bid to create a democratic Iraqi government that could become an example for other countries in the region.
“But it’s the other way around, where now in a country that didn’t know terrorism, now we see terrorism.”
In his Friday sermon at a mosque south of Beirut, Lebanon’s top Shiite Muslim scholar said Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were “being repeated in the form of the brutal American massacres against the Iraqi people.”
Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah added that Arab and Muslim hatred of America would increase as a result.
Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, a Lebanese writer for the London-based pan-Arab Al Hayat newspaper, said a worrying trend is the apparent merger of some Shiite and Sunni forces in Iraq following years of violent estrangement.
“It will be very dangerous for the situation if both the Shiite and Sunni move to this kind of joint-resistance,” he said.
Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said Iraq and the Middle East at large is less safe than a year ago, when US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“There are many more complexities in the region now because of the war, especially the absence of a peace process between the Palestinians and the Israelis and the absence of a political process in Iraq,” Erekat said by telephone from the West Bank. “And if this continues, the result will be more anarchy, chaos and extremism.”
Thousands of Palestinians staged pro-Iraq rallies in the West Bank and Gaza to mark the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, calling on Iraqis to rise up against the United States in a holy war. Protesters burned Israeli and US flags. – AP

photo:Abdelazez Al Rantissi, new leader of Palestinian resistance movement Hamas attends a Hamas protest in support of Iraq in Gaza City. Some 5000 men, representatives of Hamas’s organisations, took to the street to protest the US presence in Iraq. – AFP
Last update on: 10-4-2004