US troops raid Baghdad mosque, Sunni group's homes

9.00am

BAGHDAD - US-led troops stormed a Sunni Muslim mosque in Baghdad on Thursday and arrested its radical preacher who has urged Iraqi forces not to fight alongside Americans attacking the rebel city of Falluja.

"American forces and Iraqi National Guards raided Ibn Taymiya mosque and detained several people including Sheikh Mehdi al-Sumaid'i," said Aala Mohammed, an official on Sumaid'i's Higher Committee for Islamic Guidance and Edict.

US troops also raided the homes of senior officials of an influential Sunni group that has urged Iraqis to boycott elections in protest over the assault on Falluja.

"American occupation forces raided at dawn today the house of Muslim Clerics' Association Secretary-General Harith al-Dhari in Abu Ghraib and the house of public affairs officer Abdul Salam al-Kobeisi," the group said in a statement.

US forces searched the two houses and took some of their contents away, it said, without specifying what was taken.

The US military had no immediate comment.

Sumaid'i, who leads the purist Salafi movement of Sunni Islam in Iraq, condemned the assault on Falluja this week after a meeting of clerics at Ibn Taymiya mosque.

He told the pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper on Thursday Iraq's minority Sunnis believed interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was waging war on them and threatened a "general call to arms".

Sumaid'i accused top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of complicity in the attack, which began on Monday, through his silence.

The Muslim Clerics' Association, a nationwide group with thousands of members, called on Iraqis on Tuesday to boycott the January poll in protest against the Falluja offensive.

US-led forces are fighting to take full control of the Sunni city after the interim government vowed to root out foreign Islamic militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists it says are entrenched there.

The government has vowed to crush an insurgency ahead of the poll, but clerics opposed to the US presence in Iraq say the military assault is inflicting heavy civilian casualties.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq