Iraqi clerics use prison as rally cry

BAGHDAD -- As the prison abuse scandal gripped Washington yesterday, Sunni and Shi'ite religious leaders alike joined in prayer and invoked the images of abuse in their Friday sermons to rail against the US occupation in a rare show of unity, suggesting that the revelations from the Abu Ghraib prison could inspire a unified anti-American strategy among traditionally divided Iraqis.

"What kind of superpower makes male and female prisoners go naked?" asked Ahmad Hassan Taha, a leading Sunni cleric, whose words blasted through loudspeakers atop the mosque's minaret and echoed through several blocks of the Adamiyah neighborhood. "It shows how stupid this occupier is. These photos will inflame this region," he said, addressing thousands of worshipers who jammed the sidewalks outside the Abu Hanifa mosque for prayers.

At the prayer service in Baghdad's heavily Sunni Adamiyah district, the worshipers included thousands of Shi'ite supporters of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been mostly besieged in the southern city of Najaf, which is surrounded by US troops. The Shi'ites crossed Baghdad to pray with Sunnis, hoisting Sadr's portrait above their heads and chanting between prayers: "Yes, yes, Mahdi!" -- a reference to Sadr's Mahdi militia, who are fighting American forces.

"What's happened with the prisoners is unifying people," said Bilal Yassin, 37, a local trader. "People are seeing that the rosy picture the Americans give is lies." As prayers ended, one of Sadr's clerics led the huge crowd in chants of "Yes, yes, unity!"

After a relative lull in fighting this week, US forces again fought pitched battles against Sadr's militia in the holy Shi'ite cities of Karbala and Najaf, killing 12 Sadr fighters, according to US Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt. News reports said 11 more Iraqis also died, including a family of six killed by American fire outside Najaf.

Two Polish television journalists were shot dead in their car on the road between Baghdad and Najaf, where they were headed to cover Friday prayers. Waldemar Milewicz, a correspondent for Poland's TVP television station, and Mounir Bouamrane, an Algerian-Polish national who was his producer, died in volleys of gunfire in Mahmudiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, Polish television said.

Gunmen killed the two men very close to the spot where two CNN staff members were shot dead last January.

Underscoring the potential for the prison photographs to mobilize Iraqis, Sadr bolstered his familiar call to arms yesterday by appealing to Muslim honor, which he said the US military had violated in Abu Ghraib. "What sort of freedom and democracy can we expect from you when you take such joy in torturing Iraqi prisoners?" he asked thousands of worshipers at the holy Shi'ite mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. "I tell this to Bush: Your statements are not enough. They [the guards] must be punished in kind," he said, demanding that they face charges in Iraqi courts.

In the southern port city of Basra, a Sadr-aligned cleric, Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Bahadli, told worshipers that Iraqis were permitted to capture female British soldiers as slaves, and that $350 would be paid for every soldier captured, according to the Associated Press. The city is under British military control.

The anti-coalition tone appeared to turn more menacing during yesterday's prayer services in parts of Iraq. As the Sunni cleric began chanting the Friday prayer in Adamiyah, a column of six armored vehicles arrived on the street, cutting through the crowd, and the American soldiers inside pointed their weapons from gun turrets toward the streets. The crowd rose from the sidewalks and some could be heard shouting: "You are trying to provoke us!"

Hundreds of heavily armed militia paced the perimeters of the mosques as crowds converged on the southern Shi'ite shrines. After a long standoff, US officials appear to have closed in on Sadr's forces in recent days. Before dawn yesterday, Sadr's forces fired mortars at US forces as they moved into Najaf in an attempt to dislodge Sadr.

Kimmitt said militiamen fired on the US base in Najaf as well as at the governor's building, which American forces retook on Thursday. Yesterday morning, a US jet dropped a 500-pound bomb to destroy an insurgent mortar position.

Aziba al-Issa, 28, told the Associated Press that American fire hit her home and killed her husband and her 2-year-old daughter, as well as her brother-in-law, his wife, and their two young sons. She and her two daughters were wounded. "It was around midnight and we were preparing to go to bed," al-Izza said. "The bomb fell on our room."

Earlier this week, however, Sadr's representative to Baghdad told a Globe reporter that the militia had been able to penetrate the American cordon around Najaf, bringing in weapons and supplies for fighters inside. "We have many people coming here offering to carry out suicide bombings for us," said Amir al-Husseini, in an office in Sadr City, the sprawling Shi'ite neighborhood on Baghdad's eastern edge. "We tell them we are not doing any martyrdom operations."

Briefing reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt sought to reassure Iraqis, saying the scandal was "not irreparable" because American soldiers would be "brought to justice." He said he expected charge sheets to be made public in Iraq, and to "come soon."

Taha, the cleric, warned both Shi'ite and Sunni worshipers to avoid another huge loss of life -- this time more likely among Sadr's militia in southern Iraq. As many as 700 Iraqis are thought to have died during the intense battle for Fallujah last month. "To draw a sword in a lost battle is not wise," Taha said in his sermon. "Fighting needs organization."