Iraqis Protest U.S. Raids On Mosques

Sheikh Mahdi Al-Someidah, a member of the Supreme Authority for Religious Guidance and Awareness (A newly-founded Sunni Gathering), was detained along with 20 of his followers and worshippers in a massive sweep that lasted for six hours.

The protestors called for holy struggle against the American occupation forces during the Friday noon prayer at the Ibn Taimiya mosque in the Yarmuk district of Baghdad.

U.S. armored vehicles sealed off the mosque in southwestern Baghdad a day earlier in an operation to detain Someidah, witnesses said.

“The wave of detentions – carried out on false pretexts – reveal concealed plots to drive a wedge between people of the same religion,” said Adel-Samaray, a mosque imam in Baghdad.

He was referring to U.S. targeting of Sunnis on claims that they are mainly to blame for the rising attacks against occupation forces and rewarding Shiites for stopping short of declaring struggle against occupation.

Moving west, more than 1,000 soldiers and 500 Iraqi policemen carried out a large-scale sweep for an alleged fundamentalist cell responsible for attacks against American forces. Nine people were detained.

In the western town of Ar-Rutbah, soldiers from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment on Thursday caught a man they suspected of managing the movement of what they call “foreign fighters inside Iraq from Syria”.

They billed him as a "high-value target" for the U.S. military command, but did not rank where he stood on the U.S. military’s most wanted list, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Rutbah, 375 kilometers (233 miles) west of Baghdad, home to the flashpoint towns of Ramadi and Fallujah, is rife with jeering anti-American sentiments among embattled Sunni Muslim population.

Analysts and observers said that the U.S. raids that single out Sunni areas could flare up ethnic tensions in the already-turbulent country – a key destabilizing element the occupation forces may use to justify presence in the oil-rich country after the capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and finding no weapons of mass destruction.

Sectarian Army

In another related development, a senior U.S. military official said that the new Iraqi army is now being formed on sectarian basis, where Shiites make up 40 per cent of its members and both Sunnis and Kurds only 60 per cent.

Speaking in an interview aired by Iraqi broadcasters, Jeffery Pektan, who is responsible for coordination with the Iraqi army, gave no mention of the percentage of Turkmen or Christians in the new army.

Shiites were already given a higher representation in the new army than that in the U.S.-sanctioned Governing Council and cabinet, whose 25 members comprised 13 Shiites, 5 Sunnis, 5 Kurds, 1 Christian and 1 Turkman.

The first recruits of the New Iraqi Army (NIA) graduated on September 15 at a small northern borderline Iraqi town, with 60 percent Shiites, 25 percent Sunnis and 10 percent Kurds.

Iraqi analysts say that the U.S. sectarian-based distribution of posts in the council and in the army are based on a misleading census in 1970s that found Shiites making up 60 per cent of the population.

Iraqi Sunnis are bitterly resentful at being marginalized under the new U.S.-led order in post-war Iraq, charging that the Americans were rewarding the Kurds and the Shiites with mapping out the country’s political landscape.

Earlier this week, at least five people were killed when gunfire erupted as Turkmens and Arabs faced off with the mainly Kurdish police during a protest against a plan to include Kirkuk in a Kurdish administrative unit.

Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk are bitterly opposed to a plan by Kurds on Iraq’s U.S.-appointed Governing Council to grant significant autonomy to a Kurdish area based in three provinces they wrested from Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War, and which would include Kirkuk.