BAGHDAD – Iraqi authorities seized the headquarters of the country's most influential Sunni clerical group yesterday, sealing off its west Baghdad compound and accusing the organization of supporting al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, has long opposed the U.S. military presence in Iraq and has often taken public positions in support of Sunni insurgent goals. The association spearheaded the Sunni boycott of the January 2005 elections and has frequently been at odds with the Shiite-dominated government.
The timing of the move suggests that the government is more confident it can take action against the hard-line Sunni clerics without risking a backlash within the Sunni community and reprisal attacks by al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent groups.
But it also coincided with a powerful blast that hit a U.S. patrol in the center of Baghdad – a chilling reminder that the capital remains dangerous despite notable gains in security in recent weeks.
The roadside bombing – near the Green Zone in the tightly controlled heart of the city – killed one U.S. soldier and wounded five others, according to the U.S. military. Police said two Iraqi civilians also died.
The attackers used one of the sophisticated “penetrator” bombs the Pentagon claims are funneled to Shiite militias by Iran.
U.S. military officials say Shiite gangs are increasingly their main foes in Baghdad after making important headway against Sunni extremists.
In Baghdad, U.S. officials say U.S. and Iraqi forces have taken control of all major Sunni neighborhoods where al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents once held sway, including Ghazaliyah, where the Um al-Qura mosque is located.
Last week, U.S.-backed Sunni volunteers seized control of the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah, which had been among the most dangerous for U.S. and Iraqi forces. Speakers used mosque loudspeakers to call on the citizens to renounce al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Yesterday's raid on the clerical group began about 9 a.m. Iraqi security forces dispatched by the Sunni Endowment, a government agency that cares for Sunni mosques and shrines, surrounded the association's headquarters at the Um al-Qura mosque and demanded the staff leave by noon, the association said in a statement posted on its Web site.
Troops shut down the association's radio station, which operated from the mosque, and told employees to remove all personal belongings and furniture, the statement said.
“The association has always justified killing and assassinations carried out by al-Qaeda,” the head of the Sunni Endowment, Ahmed Abdul-Ghafoor al-Samarraie, told reporters at the mosque, built by Saddam Hussein to commemorate the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Al-Samarraie said the association had opposed the Sunni revolt against al-Qaeda in Iraq, which began last year in Anbar province and is spreading throughout the Sunni heartland.
He said the association opposed any group formed “to purge their neighborhoods of al-Qaeda elements.”
The association said it held al-Samarraie, himself a Sunni cleric, personally responsible for the safety of its employees. It condemned the “blatant assault,” saying it was carried out “for the benefit of many parties which see the association as an obstacle to their projects.”
A spokesman for the association, Mohammed Bahsar al-Faydhi, said he believed the troops raiding the mosque were not government forces but al-Samarraie's personal guards.
“We don't understand why the Sunni Endowment acted this way,” al-Faydhi said by telephone from Jordan.
Although violence in Baghdad appears down, al-Qaeda in Iraq extremists have been escalating attacks in recent days against Sunni groups outside the capital that have thrown their support to the Americans.
In one of the latest attacks, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest inside the guest house of an anti-al-Qaeda sheik, Amad al-Gartani, near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad. The blast killed the sheik and two other people, according to provincial police and al-Gartani's colleagues on the North Babil Awakening Council.
