WCRP Secretary-General William Vendley said the meeting “marked the first time all of Iraq’s religious communities have met since Saddam Hussein took power” more than two decades ago. “Religion can be an asset in Iraq’s reconstruction,” he said.

A representative of the Sunni community, Ahmad Obeid Abdullah Al-Qobeissi, put much of the onus for an Iraqi recovery on the United States as the occupying power. “Iraq has entered a dark tunnel and we don’t see the end ... but we hope that America, and there are many good people in America, will return to the right track that benefits a great power,” he told reporters.

Qobeissi said there were “signals of religious unity” in postwar Iraq and said the meeting should help consolidate these ties and contribute to the political and economic reconstruction of the war-battered country. For Archbishop Emanuel Delli, the meeting was a chance to close ranks between the Christian and Muslim communities in Iraq to build a strong platform “to help rebuild the country after this destructive war”. “Iraq needs peace and needs that everyone strives to protect its rights,” the Christian cleric said.

Sheikh Jalal Al-Husni Al-Sagheer of the majority Shiite community in Iraq hoped that the meeting will act as a “lever to influence politicians and decision-makers in one way or another” to resolve the problems facing Iraq. Prince Hassan opened the meeting by stressing the international community’s “moral obligation” toward Iraq which he said “presents unique challenges and opportunities” on the political, social, economic and strategic levels.

“The best way to prevent conflict in Iraq ... is to create a space for Iraq’s religious communities to contribute to the country’s reconstruction,” he said. More than 20 representatives of Iraq’s religious communities are attending the meeting alongside 40 international representatives of the world’s major faiths, organizers said.

Meanwhile, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency is to send an inspection team to Iraq this week to investigate a site where nuclear material disappeared after looting, a spokesman said yesterday. “We’ll send, probably Friday or Saturday, a mission of seven international experts to Iraq,” Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna.

He said the inspectors would be visiting the Al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, south of Baghdad, to “check how much low enriched uranium and ‘yellowcake’ (natural uranium) is still stocked (there) or missing”.

The mission is being carried out in cooperation with US authorities and should last “a maximum of two weeks,” Gwozdecky said. He said “many tens of tons natural uranium and at least two tons of low enriched uranium” had disappeared from Al-Tuwaitha.

IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei has warned of a potential humanitarian disaster if nuclear material were to fall into the wrong hands. In a letter to the US government on April 30, El-Baradei had urged Washington “to allow the IAEA to send a mission to Al-Tuwaitha to investigate the disturbing reports of looting at the nuclear site”. “We don’t consider it necessarily a problem of nuclear proliferation but it could be a problem of health and safety and environmental contamination,” Gwozdecky had said at the time.