At least 300,000 people marched Sunday through Baghdad in a funeral procession for Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim, the top Shiite leader assassinated in Friday's bomb attack in Najaf.
The procession was led by a coffin carrying the remains of his body.
The mourners marched through the streets of Kadhimiyah, a middle-class Shiite area on the banks of the river Tigris. Many of them called for revenge and vowed to take matters into their own hands, no longer prepared to wait for the Americans to restore order in the country.
The Shiite militia, the Badr Brigades, reasserted their presence at the funeral. "The Americans cannot give us security. It is the Iraqis who must do this and the Badr Brigades are Iraqi. This is their right," Brigade leader Sayed Ali, was quoted as saying by news agencies.
"All people are the Badr Brigades. Kill all the Baathists," chanted a few hundred mourners.
On Monday, Hakim's body will reach the city of Karbala, 80 kilometres south of Baghdad, for a similar procession, before his corpse is returned to Najaf for burial on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Bahr Al-Uloom, a Shiite dignitary on Iraq's governing council, declared Saturday he was suspending his membership of the interim body in protest against Friday's bombing.
"This (coalition) indifference (about protecting Shiite sites) prompts me to suspend my membership of the governing council, which was unable to assume its responsibility of ensuring that coalition forces protect our people, holy sites and religious authorities," Bahr Al-Uloom said in a statement.
Bahr Al-Uloom, an 80-year-old Shiite cleric who fled Iraq in 1991 and returned after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, is one of nine members of the governing council named by the US-led occupation administration in July who is due to eventually hold its rotating presidency.
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
