Hundreds of white-clad worshippers sat cross-legged on a boulevard in this war-shattered city Friday and listened to a cleric's exhortation: Iraqis must unite to create an Islamic state.
The same message resounded across Iraq on the main day of Muslim prayers, as clerics spoke about the need to come together after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Some urged the United States to leave Iraq.
"It is a happy day for us because we can pray freely. It has been a long time," said Mohamed Ghalib, a 22-year-old student among the 2,000 worshippers filling two blocks of a main thoroughfare in Nasiriyah, the southern city that saw some of the fiercest fighting during the war.
At one Baghdad mosque, worshippers listened to a white-turbaned cleric, Abdel-Hadi al-Muhammadawi, demand that foreign "occupiers" leave Iraq, an apparent reference to the United States and Britain.
Then the cleric, a Kalashnikov assault rifle before him, recounted a tale of imprisonment and torture at the hands of Saddam's henchmen.
"They tortured my son in front of my cell to put pressure on me. They tore apart my turban," the sheik said, and he burst into tears. Hundreds of followers wept along with him.
Clerics from both of Islam's main groupings Sunnis and Shiites called for unity and equality in a new Iraq. But the Shiite messages are the ones attracting the most attention these days.
The Shiites, long repressed under Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime, comprise 60 percent of the country's population of 24 million and are fast filling a power vacuum left by Saddam's ouster.
Iraqi Shiites are organizing local committees, doling out funds to pay salaries, collecting looted property and sending militias to secure hospitals and electric plants. They have raised concerns that some may try to install a theocracy like the one next door, in Shiite-dominated Iran.
Shiite exiles in Iran have had a part in the new assertiveness. A prominent Iraqi cleric in Iran has issued orders for Shiites to set up administrations in Iraqi cities to position themselves better as a new government is formed.
"We must at the earliest opportunity in every Iraqi city move to fill the void in administering the city in order to put the future government, whatever form it takes, before a fait accompli," Ayatollah Kadhem al-Hussein al-Haeri said in the edict dated April 9, the day Saddam's statue was pulled down in Baghdad. He repeated in the call in April 20.
Al-Haeri, who resides in the Iranian holy city Qom, is close to Muqtada al-Sadr, an influential young Iraqi cleric whose followers have taken up local control in several areas in southern Iraq and Baghdad.
Referring to the United States, he also told clerics to preserve Iraqi morals in the face of attempts by the "Great Satan" to "spread immorality ... by opening titillating satellite stations and spreading debauchery."
In his April 20 statement, al-Haeri called for creation of an "government elected by the Iraqi people based on their religion and values."
The United States has accused mostly Shiite Iran's Islamic government of seeking to gain influence in Iraq. Iran has close cultural ties to Shiites in Iraq and many opposition Iraqi Shiites fled into exile in Iran.
In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated Washington will not allow creation of "an Iranian-type government" in Iraq. "That isn't going to happen," he said.
In southeastern Iraq, a Shiite cleric who took over city hall in Kut and claimed control of the city left the building peacefully, U.S. military officials said Friday.
It was unclear why Said Abbas left the building and whether he was dropping his claim to authority. As U.S. Marines entered Kut more than a week ago and Saddam's rule crumbled, Abbas seized city hall with several dozen lightly armed bodyguards. His followers had been protesting the presence of U.S. troops.
Although Shiites and the Sunnis often disagree, the sermons in Baghdad's mosques on Friday were of a piece, calling on the faithful to pull together in restoring the disorderly and troubled country.
Sheik Moayed al-Aathami, who led the prayers at the Sunni Abi Hanifah mosque in the neighborhood of Azamiya, said: "We want brotherly people, who help each other in times of difficulties."
"We want Muslim people equal in rights and duties Kurds, Arabs and minorities. We want Muslim people with no sectarian sensitivities," al-Aathami said.
In Baghdad's al-Mansour neighborhood, Shiites held prayers at the al-Rahman mosque, still under construction, and chanted in one voice, "Muslims. Not Sunnis or Shiites."
In Nasiriyah, Asaad al-Nasseri, a prominent Shiite cleric who just returned from exile in Syria, said clerics should play a constructive role in postwar Iraq without overstepping their bounds.
"We have to preserve this country by respecting the professionals and not interfere in their work," he told worshippers. "We have to be ready in the long term to establish our own Islamic state."