BAGHDAD, 15 November 2007 — Iraqi government soldiers shut down the Baghdad headquarters of one of the most powerful Sunni Muslim groups in Iraq yesterday, the group said. Soldiers moved into the Um Al-Qura Mosque in a Sunni district Ghazaliyhah in western Baghdad where the Committee of Muslim Scholars is based and ordered the occupants out, according to a statement on the group’s website.

The committee, which is said to be close to the anti-US insurgency in Iraq, is headed by cleric Harith Al-Dhari, one of the most important Sunni Muslim religious figures in Iraq who currently lives in exile in Jordan. The association said the soldiers were acting on the orders of Ahmad Abdel Rafur Sammarrai, who runs a government agency charged with managing Sunni mosques and other religious sites.

The raid is yet another sign of the growing battle for influence between the Committee of Muslim Scholars and rival Sunni groups, some of which have joined US forces in the fight against Al-Qaeda.

Employees were told to remove all personal belongings and even haul out furniture, that troops said would be destroyed if left behind, it said. The group also operates a radio station from the mosque, and its transmission was cut as well, the statement said. The final sounds on the air were of an announcer apologizing to listeners and telling them he was being forced out of the building, the group said.

An official at the Sunni Endowment could not confirm the raid, but said the government had plans to renovate the Um Al-Qura Mosque, which sits on government property. “We have nothing against the association ... and its members, but we have plans to renovate the mosque and construct more buildings inside,” the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media. “However, this matter has been seen by the association as a threat to their existence in the mosque,” the official said.

The association has long opposed the US military presence in Iraq and has often been at odds with the Shiite-backed government. The association spearheaded the Sunni boycott of the January 2005 elections, which fueled the insurgency.

Another statement posted on the association’s website said the group held the Sunni endowment’s chief, Ahmed Abdul-Ghafoor Al-Samarraie, responsible for the safety of its employees.

A spokesman for the association, Mohammed Bahsar Al-Faydi, told The Associated Press that he believed the troops raiding the mosque were not government forces but Samarraie’s personal guards. “We don’t understand why the Sunni Endowment acted this way,” said Faydi, who lives in Jordan.

Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani ruled out a Turkish “invasion” of his country and said the cross-border crisis over Kurdish rebels was easing, in an interview published yesterday. “I don’t think there is any danger of a Turkish invasion of (Iraqi) Kurdistan,” Talabani, himself a Kurd, told Egyptian government newspaper Al-Ahram.