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NAJAF, Iraq, March 6: Pope Francis opened a historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Saturday in a powerful call for coexistence in a land torn by sectarianism and violence.
Francis’s encounter in the holy southern city of Najaf, during a whirlwind and perilous journey through Iraq, marked the first time a pope met with such an important Shiite cleric.
Ekhbariya state television showed the Pope’s large convoy moving through Najaf.
The Catholic leader has visited predominantly Muslim countries, including Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinian territories, using those trips to call for interfaith dialogue.
Sistani is one of the most important figures in Shiite Islam, both inside and outside of Iraq.
It exerts enormous influence on politics. His edicts sent Iraqis to free elections for the first time in 2005, rallied hundreds of thousands of men to fight the Islamic State in 2014, and toppled an Iraqi government under pressure from mass demonstrations in 2019.
Sistani, 90, rarely attends meetings and has refused to speak with Iraq’s current and former prime ministers, according to officials close to him. Sistani agreed to meet with the pope on the condition that Iraqi officials were not present, said a source in the president’s office.
The meeting with Francis took place in Sistani’s humble house that he has rented for decades, located in a narrow alley in Najaf.
An ascetic cleric of almost mythical stature among millions of Shiite followers, Sistani intervened at critical junctures as Iraq moved from crisis to crisis.
An emaciated figure, the lone Sistani worked from his Spartan base near the golden-domed shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf. He was rarely seen in public.
Pope Francis began his riskiest overseas trip on Friday, flying to Iraq amid the tightest security ever seen for a papal visit to appeal to the country’s leaders and people to end militant violence and fighting. religious.
The country has deployed thousands of security personnel to protect it during the visit, which comes after a series of rocket and suicide bombings and an increase in COVID-19 cases.
The 84-year-old Francis, limping from what appeared to be a new outbreak of his painful sciatica, made a passionate call on Iraqis to finally give peacekeepers a chance during a meeting of Iraqi officials and diplomats at the presidential palace.
He later paid tribute to those killed in religiously motivated attacks, visiting a Baghdad church where Islamist gunmen killed about 50 worshipers in 2010.
Iraq’s security has improved since the defeat of the Islamic State in 2017, but the country remains a stage for global and regional reckoning, especially a bitter rivalry between the United States and Iran that has played out on Iraqi soil.
The 2003 US invasion, after years of international sanctions and a devastating war with Iran instigated by former leader Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, plunged Iraq into sectarian conflict and chronic mismanagement that has plagued it ever since.
After his meeting with Sistani, Francis will visit the ruins of ancient Ur in southern Iraq, revered as the birthplace of Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. – Reuters
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