Earlier this week, a leading cleric in Falluja, Hamza Abbas al-Issawi, 70, considered the city's grand imam, who had urged Sunni Arabs to defy the insurgents and vote in the Dec. 15 elections for a full four-year national government, was shot and killed. He had received insurgent death threats in recent months.As Normblog points out, that's in Falluja.
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In Falluja's mosques, angry residents have vowed in recent days to avenge the clerics' killings by hunting down Islamic extremists loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America's most-wanted man in Iraq. The anger spread on Friday to fiery condemnations at the main weekly prayers at two of Baghdad's most militant Sunni Arab mosques.
At the Mother of All Battles Mosque in the west of the city, the preacher, Sheik Ali Abu Hassan, called the killers "murderers" and said believers should respond by voting in large numbers. At the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the eastern Adhamiya district, a stronghold of support for Iraq's ousted ruler, Saddam Hussein, the preacher, Sheik Ahmad al-Samarrai, said, "The election is both legitimate and necessary, and your duty to vote is heavier than a mountain."
Page 12 News
Normblog finds some interesting information buried on page 12 of a Saturday NYTimes story:
