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| The Alliance |
| Saudi clerics denounced US assault, call for jihad |
| 2001-10-20 |
KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Children emptied their piggybanks and a woman donated her wedding dress to a Saudi campaign that is raising millions for Afghan victims of U.S.-led attacks. With Muslims streaming into mosques Friday for weekly prayers, clerics in this Gulf nation and across the Middle East denounced the U.S. assault and called for holy war. Criticism was not directed just at the United States for its air campaign, which targets Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and the al-Qaida network of Osama bin Laden. Muslim nations -- in particular Pakistan and Turkey -- were singled out for siding with the Americans in a war that has led to the deaths of innocent Muslims. "We condemn what happened to the Americans, but what is happening to the Afghans is even worse," Sheik Mohammad bin Mubarak al-Tawwash, preacher at the Al-Kabir Mosque in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, said Friday. "We pray to God to protect the Muslims ... and we pray to God to give Muslims victory against the infidels." Yes, what's happened to Afghanistan is much worse than what happened in New York. Afghanistan fell under the control of a mercenary movement funded and controlled by Saudi Arabia; it's a movement that managed to bring even more death, destruction and poverty to the country than it had before. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |