Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki attended a traditional Ramadan feast at a Queens mosque on Monday night, telling a multinational crowd from Iraq, Iran, India and beyond that the enemy bringing down the minarets of Shiite mosques in Iraq was the same enemy who brought down the World Trade Center.
These are people who "have a sick interpretation of Islam," he said, attributing most of the violence in Iraq to a few religious clerics and others who had turned away from the religion. "This is an open front against civilization, so it is the duty of all governments to fight in the face of this challenge."
Al-Maliki, who signed the death warrant that sent Saddam Hussein to the gallows, also blamed Iraq's current problems on the dead dictator, saying he had left "a heavy difficult inheritance that we still suffer from."
That legacy included sectarian tension and the lack of trust between factions, he continued, worse even than the destruction that he said al-Qaeda was now visiting on the country.
The prime minister said Iraq would take over responsibility for his country's security as soon as the US determined it was time to withdraw, a statement that has drawn criticism in the past for being unrealistic.
He also said it was too early to determine what the long-term military relationship between the two nations would be, saying it was premature to draw parallels with a place like South Korea, which senior US officials sometimes mention as a model.
The crowd of several hundred people filling the mosque in the building that also houses the offices of the Al-Khoei Foundation was mostly sympathetic, prone to dismiss the criticism from US senators and other officials that al-Maliki should be replaced.
Much of that criticism centers on his failures to overcome sectarian differences in Iraq, the lack of an agreement on such key factors as dividing the country's vast oil wealth and his inclination to remain too sympathetic to his own Shiite faction.
"He is trying to put all the Sunnis and Shiites together, but the Sunnis push him away," said Mustapha al-Nasiri, 46, an Iraqi petroleum engineer now selling real estate in Boston. He argued that while not all Sunnis are bad, they formed the core of the Baath Party and of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a home-grown insurgent group that US intelligence agencies say is foreign led.
Another Iraqi immigrant worried that all the criticism would only help Iraq's enemies.
"They make him weak," said Hussein Al-Jabouri, a 41-year-old businessman from Dearborn Heights, Michigan. He said he also wanted to know what the prime minister's plans were for developing mostly Shiite, southern Iraq, plans he said were long overdue.
Maliki, however, was long about the difficult struggles still ahead but short on specifics.
"The deeper it goes, the more complicated it gets, so Iraqi politicians stay on the surface," said Sheik Husham al-Husainy, a visiting cleric from Dearborn. "Besides, when it comes to Iraq, on a lot of questions only God knows."
Still, audience members like Sheik Husainy and Jabouri said they got what they came for -- a little taste of Iraq.
The prime minister, surrounded by his top aides, sat at the end of one such row with Sheikh Fadhel al-Sahalani, the director of Al-Khoei Foundation in New York and the North American representative of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top cleric in Iraq.
Sahalani introduced al-Maliki by asking everyone to say a prayer for all Iraqis and others who sacrificed themselves in fighting for the country.
"We are still waiting for a change for the better," he said.
When it came to the question and answer period, some of the faithful asked when Iraq would be peaceful enough for them to visit, including making the pilgrimage to the holy city of Najaf. Shiite Islam broke away from the main Sunni branch in the fights over succession in the years after the Prophet Mohammed died in 680, with the Shiites backing Ali, the prophet's son-in-law and cousin. A huge mosque has been built around the shrine in Najaf, where tradition holds that he was buried.
"When will Najaf be safe enough to make the pilgrimage?" yelled out Azzam Mirza, a 60-year-old Indian-American.
"You can come with us now!" responded the prime minister.
"He said he wanted to visit, not to die there," quipped Sheik Husham al-Husainy, a visiting cleric from Dearborn.
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