BAGHDAD, 31 March 2007 — Iraq’s key religious leader Moqtada Sadr made a scathing attack on the United States in a statement issued yesterday, blaming it for Iraq’s woes and calling for a mass demonstration April 9 to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s fall. The statement was the first by Sadr since March 14 when he called on his supporters to resist US forces in Iraq through peaceful means. Sadr has been said by US and Iraqi officials to be in neighboring Iran. His aides insist he is still in Iraq.
The latest statement was read to worshippers during Friday prayers at a mosque in Kufa, a holy Shiite city south of Baghdad where Sadr frequently led the ritual. It also was read to thousands of worshippers in Baghdad’s Sadr City Shiite district, a stronghold of his Mahdi Army militia. “I renew my call for the occupier (the United States) to leave our land,” he said in the statement. “The departure of the occupier will mean stability for Iraq, victory for Islam and peace and defeat for terrorism and infidels.”
Sadr, whose militia fought US troops in 2004 but has generally cooperated with an ongoing US-Iraqi security push in Baghdad, blamed the presence of US forces in Iraq for the violence raging in the country, lack of services as well as sectarian bloodshed. “Four years on and Iraq is still without water, electricity, fuel, security, safety and, furthermore, it is in the middle of sedition,” he said.
Meanwhile, nearly 400 people have been killed in Iraq over the past three days, officials and medics said yesterday, as insurgents and sectarian militias defied a massive US security crackdown billed as a last chance to restore order to Baghdad. A series of coordinated bombings of Shiite marketplaces in and north of the capital undercut a latest plea from embattled Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki for a joint effort to curb the bloodshed threatening to tear his country apart.
“The country is facing many challenges which need a consolidated front in which all Iraqis must participate,” Maliki said just hours before 125 people were killed in marketplace bombings in Baghdad and Khalis. Two suicide bombers tore through the market in the capital on Thursday that medics said killed 82 men, women and children.
