BAGHDAD, Iraq - The imam at one of Baghdad's largest mosques urged more than 1,000 listeners yesterday to wage a jihad, or religious war, against U.S. occupying forces in Iraq.
Speaking at Friday prayer services, Imam Mouaid al-Ubaidi denounced the Americans as "invaders" and "aggressors" and implicitly praised recent guerrilla attacks against U.S. soldiers as self-defense by people who are being "strangled."
The unusually bellicose sermon by the Sunni Muslim cleric came just hours before U.S. officials, responding to growing Iraqi disenchantment, offered to give Iraqis more authority in a U.S.-controlled interim administration that is expected to be formed next month.
Heightened frustrations with the U.S. occupation are believed to be inciting attacks like the one mounted in the central Iraqi town of Fallujah on Thursday.
One U.S. soldier was killed and five others injured when a grenade or a mortar round hit their encampment, 30 miles west of Baghdad. It was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings that has left eight soldiers dead in less than two weeks.
"There are only two powers now in the world," Ubaidi said in his Friday sermon. "One is America, which is tyrannical and oppressive. The other is a warrior who has not yet been awakened from his slumber, and that warrior is Islam.
"Our brave Muslim Iraqi people, who care about their honor and their country, refuse all manner of occupation," he continued. Declaring that a jihad is justified to protect oneself or one's religion, he went on to declare that "Islamic people don't have any of these rights," and that "it is these Islamic people's right to carry the banner of jihad to regain those lost rights."
In the immediate aftermath of the war, U.S. officials spoke hopefully of creating a provisional Iraqi government put together by a national conference of Iraqi leaders.
That notion died in the ensuing chaos. This week, they presented a revised plan that would have created a purely advisory "Iraqi face" on the new government. Yesterday's newly revised plan would go further, creating what the Americans called a genuine "Iraqi partner."
L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, presented the new offer at a meeting last night with a broad array of Iraqi political leaders.
The key change in the plan, according to one official, would be to give a proposed Iraqi political council more power in naming ministers to an interim administration under a new occupation authority.
