Mass protest in Baghdad

2005-04-09 08:55

Baghdad - Baghdad was on a knife's edge on Saturday as tens of thousands of Shiites converged on the centre of the Iraqi capital for an anti-US protest to mark two years since the city fell to coalition troops.

Police cars blocked off main roads in central Baghdad and two major bridges across the Tigris River that cuts the capital in half as thousands marched through the street, chanting: "No, no USA, no, no America, no, no to the occupation."

Radical preachers had called on Friday on their congregations to rally in Firdos Square in central Baghdad where US troops helped haul down a statue of Saddam in celebrated footage that was beamed around the world.

Tens of thousands of protestors from Baghdad's Shiite slum of Sadr City headed toward the square, carrying Iraqi flags.

Some waved the notorious picture of a hooded naked Iraqi detainee, with wires attached to his body from Abu Ghraib prison scandal last year that blemished the US record in Iraq.

For the last two weeks, radical cleric Moqtada Sadr has called for thousands of followers to descend on Firdos square, the symbol of Iraq's liberation from Saddam, and demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Sunni clerics from the Committee of Muslim Scholars, which organized a boycott of historic January elections, urged followers to join the protest on Friday.

Thousands of Shiites had been ferried to the capital on buses since Friday.

- SAPA