DAMASCUS, 22 October 2006 — Syria’s Sunni leader Sheikh Salah Al-Deen Kuftaro yesterday said he strongly supported the Makkah agreement between Iraqi Shiite and Sunni religious figures rejecting sectarian violence and calling for peace between different religious sects in Iraq.
“We, the religious leaders and employees in the field of Islamic studies, strongly support what was contained in this document and call upon our brothers in Iraq of all sects and ethnicities to commit themselves to it,” Sheikh Salah Al-Deen Kuftaro said in a statement yesterday.
The Makkah meeting was sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and attended by the group’s Turkish Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu.
Participants represented a cross-section of Iraq’s shattered society, including senior Shiite and Sunni religious leaders, the former leader of Iraq’s largest Sunni party and a senior official from the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Kuftaro reiterated in the statement that “it is not allowed to kill a Muslim under any pretext,” and called upon all religious leaders in Iraq to declare their support for the agreement and make their followers commit to it.
In Baghdad, the declaration was welcomed as “a positive step” by Adnan Al-Dulaimi, who heads the National Concord Front, the largest Sunni bloc in the Iraqi Parliament.
“We call on the authorities, the parties, the tribes and religious leaders to stick to the declaration and to support it,” Al-Dulaimi told a Baghdad news conference. “The government has a major role to play in implementing the document, especially with regard to freeing prisoners,” he said.
Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani was not represented at the gathering, but sent a letter of support that was read to participants, in which he expressed the view that “there has not been a confessional conflict between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq but a political crisis.”
Shiite radical leader Moqtada Al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia have been blamed for much of the killing on the Shiite side in Iraq, did not send a representative to the gathering although he gave it his qualified support on Wednesday.
