Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/world/middleeast/25mosque.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, attended a traditional Ramadan feast at a Queens mosque last night, telling a multinational crowd from Iraq, Iran, India and beyond that the enemy bringing down the minarets of Shiite mosques in Iraq was the same enemy who brought down the World Trade Center.
These are people who “have a sick interpretation of Islam,” he said, attributing most of the violence in Iraq to a few religious clerics and others who had turned away from the religion. “This is an open front against civilization, so it is the duty of all governments to fight in the face of this challenge.”
Mr. Maliki, who signed the death warrant that sent Saddam Hussein to the gallows, also blamed Iraq’s current problems on the dead dictator, saying he had left “a heavy difficult inheritance that we still suffer from.”
That legacy included sectarian tension and the lack of trust between factions, he continued, worse even than the destruction that he said Al-Qaeda was now visiting on the country.