Resistance will be stepped up: (Sunni) clerics

Resistance will be stepped up: clerics

MOSUL, Iraq: Islamic groups in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul vowed on Thursday to step up their resistance to US forces, following the capture earlier this month of their oppressor, Saddam Hussein. “Now that Saddam has been captured, the Islamic resistance is going to intensify and will become more effective,” warned Sheikh Ali Ussam, a preacher at a mosque in this conservative Sunni town some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad. “Until now, operations have been limited to the minimum, to avoid loyalists of the ousted regime taking credit for them,” said 33-year-old Ussam, who is a member of the Union of Muslim Clerics, founded in 1968 but which remained clandestine under the former regime. “The religious resistance is going to increase now, because the occupiers are becoming more and more aggressive and believe all Iraqis are suspects,” said Sheikh Rayan Khalil, president of Mosul’s Committee of Muslim Clerics which was formed after the fall of Saddam’s regime in April. Khalil said that the guerrillas “are not controlled by the clerics or the mosque imams,” but “act individually.” —AFP

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_27-12-2003_pg4_2

press, I don't doubt it.

wounded and god knows how many civilian casualties, I don't doubt it.

and I will list them

1.- Iraq the FAILED state, up for grabs by neighboors and friends, like oh Lebanon?

2.- Iraq the Islamic Republic and no friend of the West... anybody in the West.

After years of bloody civil war, three or more autonomous zones emerge: Kurdistan (which Turkey will regard as an enemy state); the Sunni statelet; and the Shia south, which may, to some degree, be a de facto Greater Iran.

Thanks, George.

Much blood will be shed setting the boundaries.

and it may be out of my ignorance. Would an Arab Shia state really become that allied to a Persian Shia state? Last I'd checked, there wasn't exactly much friendship there and agreeing on supporting the same centuries old schism in a religion wouldn't be enough to cause an alliance any more than one between Protestant England and Protestant Germany.

On the other hand, a factor I'm not sure of at all is what influence Saudi Wahhabi Shia has in Southern Iraq.