Fallujah's clerics condemn mutilation
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- Muslim clerics yesterday condemned the mutilation of the bodies of four US civilians -- but not their slayings -- and the military announced the combat deaths of two more Americans.
There was no sign of US military activity in the Fallujah area to suggest retaliatory action was imminent; US administrator L. Paul Bremer III has said those who killed the four civilians and burned their bodies "will not go unpunished."
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one American soldier and wounded another yesterday, the military said. And a US Marine died as a result of hostile action a day earlier in Anbar Province, of which Fallujah is the most populous city.
Three people were killed yesterday outside the northern city of Kirkuk when a bomb they were planting exploded prematurely, police said. The target was the town hall in Riyadh, 16 miles west of Kirkuk.
In Fallujah, Sheik Fawzi Nameq addressed 600 worshipers at a mosque opposite the mayor's office, not far from the scene of Wednesday's deadly ambush of the American civilians.
"Islam does not condone the mutilation of the bodies of the dead," the cleric said.
"Why do you want to bring destruction to our city? Why do you want to bring humiliation to the faithful? My brothers, wisdom is required here," said Nameq, who did not pass a judgment on the killings.
His sermon conformed with a directive issued by senior Fallujah clerics asking mosque imams to denounce the mutilation.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of US military operations in Iraq, said the sermons did not go far enough.
"While the condemnation of the mutilation was helpful, that is only a partial answer," Kimmitt wrote in an e-mail. "Murder of innocents should be condemned."
Kimmitt has pledged to hunt down the culprits, but said clashes could be avoided if Fallujah officials make arrests.
The charred remains of the Americans were dragged through the streets after insurgents ambushed their vehicles. Two bodies were hung from a bridge.
Wednesday's gruesome events, and the likelihood of a US military response, brought to the surface months of pent-up resentment against the American occupation.
"Islam bans what was done to the bodies, but the Americans are as brutal as the youths who burned and mutilated the bodies," said Mahdi Ahmed Saleh, a retired school principal who now runs a small grocery store. "They have done so much to us and they have humiliated us so often."
Saleh, like most men in Fallujah, singled out raids on homes as the most troubling US military practice.
"Look at this wide and long street," he said. "Do you see any women? So, if we don't let them out on the street, can you imagine how we feel when American soldiers barge in and see them in their sleeping gowns?"
Fallujah is in the conservative Sunni Arab heartland, an area where Saddam Hussein found many recruits for his elite army units and feared security agencies.
City residents say their suffering under occupation has been compounded by their loss of power in the post-Hussein order. The Shi'ite majority and the large Kurdish community now are the two dominant forces in Iraq. A poll of Iraqis showed 71 percent of those questioned in Anbar Province find attacks on coalition forces acceptable. Only 17 percent of Iraqis elsewhere shared that view. The poll, conducted in February by Oxford Research International, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. "The American military says there must be security first and then we can have reconstruction," said Hussein Ali, a former air force engineer who is a member of Fallujah's US-backed governing council. "We keep telling them that if there is no reconstruction, there will be no security."
