KARACHI, 11 August 2003 — Pakistani cricket hero-turned politician Imran Khan yesterday urged the government not to send troops to Iraq saying that it would tarnish the image of Pakistan’s army.
“It seems our government has cut a deal with the Americans about sending our troops to Iraq, but I may warn this very action will be against a Muslim nation and will isolate us in the Islamic world,” he said.
Imran, who led Pakistan to victory in the 1992 cricket World Cup and now leads the moderate Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (Justice Movement) told reporters if Pakistani troops went to Iraq they would be labeled mercenaries.
Pakistan has said it would consider sending its troops only if the Iraqi people welcomed such a mission and the deployment was under the “legitimate” cover of the United Nations or the 55-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
Pakistan’s six-party religious alliance of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which has a parliamentary majority, has already rejected the deployment as un-Islamic.
MMA Secretary General Maulana Fazlur Rehman Saturday said President Pervez Musharraf, who is also head of the military, had no “legal, constitutional or religious right to send Pakistani troops for peacekeeping to Iraq.”
He said the alliance had set up a council of Islamic clerics to pronounce “a fatwa (edict) against sending troops to Iraq to operate under the command of US and British occupation forces.”
Pakistan, a key ally in what Washington calls its “war on terror”, has been asked by the United States to send around 10,000 soldiers to Iraq to help secure the postwar peace.
Islamabad, which backed the United States in its war against the Taleban in neighboring Afghanistan, says it has agreed in principle to send troops to Iraq.
