Sadr tells "anti-Christ Bush" to leave Iraq !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/tm_ ... q&method=f


Published: April 28, 2007


BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The powerful Iraqi cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr called President George W. Bush the "anti-Christ" on Saturday and urged him to heed calls by the opposition Democrats to withdraw from the chaos of Iraq.

Sadr, whose ministers quit Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government this month, renewed his demand for a U.S. pullout a day after Bush pledged to veto legislation that would require U.S. troops to begin leaving Iraq by October 1.

Calling Bush "the greatest evil," Sadr said in a letter read out by a Sadrist MP in parliament that an eventual U.S. pullout would be a "victory for the Iraqi people".

"Here are the Democrats demanding that you withdraw at least with a timetable and you are stubborn against them," said Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia fought two uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004.

"You are like the one-eyed anti-Christ. You look with one eye and refuse to look with the other," he told Bush.

Maliki, under pressure from his Washington supporters to pass key power-sharing agreements to reconcile Iraq's warring communities, met a Democrat-led Congressional delegation in Baghdad on Saturday.

A statement from Maliki's office quoted him as telling the delegation that his government is committed "to building its armed forces and taking over the security portfolio all over Iraq in the quickest time".

Bush has refused to set any timetable for a withdrawal, calling it a "surrender date". More than 3,300 U.S. troops have been killed in the increasingly unpopular war since the invasion in 2003.

Defying the veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress this week approved a $124 billion war spending measure that would require U.S. combat troops to leave by March 31, 2008.

They have promised to send the bill to the White House on Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of Bush declaring aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended" after Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003. The aircraft carrier was decorated with a large "Mission Accomplished" banner.

"SADDAM IS DEAD"

In Awja, the small town north of Baghdad where Saddam was born, young children gathered with men and women on Saturday to celebrate the birthday of the once-feared dictator, who was executed on December 30 for crimes against humanity.

"The children brought candles, but we didn't light them because Saddam is dead," said Faten Abdulkader, one of the children's supervisors, as flowers and banners were laid on Saddam's tomb in an extravagant, marble-floored mosque hall.

Four years after Saddam's ouster, Iraq has been riven by sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunni Arabs that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and pitched the country close to all-out sectarian civil war.

Iraq has become the "central front of al Qaeda's global campaign," General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told reporters in Washington on Thursday.

Sadr rallied tens of thousands of Iraqis in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf last month to protest against the presence of more than 140,000 U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

A firebrand cleric who draws large support from impoverished Shi'ites, Sadr ordered his six ministers to quit Maliki's cabinet in protest at the prime minister's refusal to set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal.

Sadr's Mehdi Army has been blamed for widespread sectarian killings of Sunni Arabs, but it but has kept a low profile during a 10-week-old, U.S.-backed security crackdown in Baghdad, reportedly on Sadr's orders.

The crackdown is seen as a last-ditch attempt to impose order and buy time for political reform and reconciliation.

While quitting the government, Sadr has kept his 30-seat block in parliament, where analysts expect him to play the role of a spoiler.