MOSCOW — One of Russia’s top Muslim leaders called for a jihad April 3 against the United States for its attack on Iraq but was quickly threatened Friday by government officials to keep quiet or risk prosecution.
“We will collect donations and then use that money to buy weapons for the struggle against America and to buy supplies for the Iraqi people,” Russia’s Supreme Mufti Talgat Tadjuddin was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Tadjuddin did not specify precisely Thursday how the country’s 20 million Muslims could take part in the jihad (holy war) but said in a March 29 interview with the Izvestia newspaper that those believers not satisfied with prayer could go “quickly and quietly to Baghdad and take weapons in your hands, and if you have no weapons, strangle the aggressors with your hands.”
Other Muslim leaders scoffed at Tadjuddin’s call to jihad. Tadjuddin’s longtime foe, Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, labeled the call to arms a “populist political act,” Interfax reported.
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