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Call to Prayer Echoes Across US Army Base in Saddam’s Hometown
Patrick Moser
Agence France Presse, Arab News
TIKRIT, Iraq, 29 November 2003 — After the call to prayer echoed yesterday across a US Army base in the heart of Iraq’s combat zone, US Army Sgt. Mesahchai Whitaker took off her combat boots and walked into a mosque.
Having swapped her kevlar helmet for a headscarf, she knelt on the carpeted floor, facing Makkah. The only woman at the Al-Hara Al-Gabir Mosque, she prayed at a distance from the other faithful.
Whitaker, 43, was also the only US soldier to attend Friday prayers at the small mosque within the palace compound that serves as the 4th Infantry Division’s Iraq headquarters in the hometown of ousted President Saddam Hussein.
As she prayed, the sound of mortar echoed outside, a reminder that the US Army base is located right by the center of Tikrit, a cauldron of anti-American violence, 180 kilometers north of Baghdad.
The other worshipers all work at the base, some as members of the US-trained Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps and others as civilian contractors catering for the troops.
“It’s a wonderful experience, as a Muslim to be here,” said Mesahchai, from New Jersey, whose parents converted to the Islamic faith before she was born. But since she arrived in Iraq seven months ago, she has never been to a mosque outside US military bases. Much as she’d like to, the risk is too high. “We’re still at war,” she said.
Other than verses from the Qur’an and a few phrases she has picked up in Iraq, Mesahchai speaks no Arabic and has little contact with other worshipers. She also said none of her fellow soldiers has given her a hard time over her religion, though some have expressed curiosity about it.
“I don’t think most soldiers understand Islam,” she said, as she put on her desert boots on her way out of the mosque, which overlooks the Tigris River. “They may have a hard time adjusting, sometimes ignorance is bliss, sometimes it brings on fear,” said Mesahchai, the mother of a 22-year-old daughter.
Since being deployed in Iraq, Mesahchai has managed to worship every Friday. “We are soldiers first, but it doesn’t matter where we are, we can always worship.”
She usually attends Friday prayers at the Speicher base near Tikrit, but decided this time to try the mosque at Forward Operating Base Ironhorse.
Gamal Aisah, who led the prayers, said he had no problem with that, but then added that there was in fact a small problem. “In Islam, men and women don’t pray in the same space,” said Aisah, an Egyptian driver who trucks in food from neighboring Kuwait for the US troops. “This mosque has no separate place for women,” he said, adding “the problem is not with her, she has a right to pray, the problem is with the mosque.”
In an unrelated development, the United Nations refugee organization UNHCR expressed concern in Geneva yesterday about the fate of more than 400 Palestinians stranded in camps on the Iraqi and Jordanian border.
The 427 refugees, previously living in exile in Iraq, join an estimated 1,800 refugees — mostly ethnic Kurds who fled Iraq’s Al Tash refugee camp — in eastern Jordan.
The UNHCR warned that Jordan’s capacity to absorb more refugees is reaching its limit, while appealing to Egypt and Lebanon to grant permission for re-entry to Palestinians holding travel documents.
Meanwhile, the US-led coalition and the interim leadership it has installed in Iraq were left scrambling for position yesterday after the powerful Shiite religious hierarchy rejected their newly unveiled plans for an accelerated handover of sovereignty and demanded immediate polls.
On the record, US officials said only that they were considering the way forward after top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani rejected the arcane system of indirect selection by caucus they announced two weeks ago to get a caretaker government in place by June next year. But off the record, a senior official told The Washington Post that the prior polls, which the coalition has so far resisted, were now a “possibility” and appeared to give the top a cleric veto over the agreement they signed with the interim leadership on Nov. 15.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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