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Pope Francis began a historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani on Saturday, in a powerful appeal for coexistence in a land torn by sectarianism and violence.
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Francis’s meeting in the holy southern city of Najaf, during a whirlwind and risky tour of Iraq, marked the first time a pope has met with such a senior Shia cleric.
State-owned Ekhbariya 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 inter-religious dialog.
Sistani is one of the most important figures in Shia Islam, both within Iraq and beyond.
Senior Iraqi Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf on March 13, 2019. (AP)
He wields enormous influence over politics. His edicts sent Iraqis to free polls for the first time in 2005, rallied hundreds of thousands of men to fight ISIS in 2014 and toppled an Iraqi government under pressure from mass demonstrations in 2019.
Sistani, 90, rarely takes meetings, and has refused talks with Iraq’s current and former prime ministers, according to officials close to him. Sistani agreed to meet the pope on condition that no Iraqi officials would be present, said a source in the president’s office.
The meeting with Francis took place at Sistani’s humble home which he has rented for decades, located along a narrow alleyway in Najaf.
An ascetic cleric of almost mythical stature among millions of Shia followers, Sistani intervened at critical junctures as Iraq lurched from one crisis to another.
A gaunt figure, the reclusive Sistani worked from his spartan base near the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. He was rarely seen in public.
Pope Francis began his most risky foreign trip on Friday, flying into 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 religious strife.
Pope Francis arrives at Baghdad International Airport. (Reuters)
The country has deployed thousands of security personnel to protect him during the visit, which comes after a spate of rocket and suicide bomb attacks and a spike in COVID-19 cases.
The 84-year-old Francis, limping from what appeared to be a fresh flare-up of his painful sciatica, made an impassioned call for Iraqis to finally give peacemakers a chance during a gathering of Iraqi officials and diplomats at the presidential palace.
He later paid tribute to people killed in attacks motivated by religion, visiting a Baghdad church where terrorist gunmen killed about 50 worshippers in 2010.
Iraq’s security has improved since the defeat of ISIS in 2017, but the country continues to be a theater for global and regional score-settling, especially a bitter US-Iran rivalry that has played out on Iraqi soil.
The US invasion of 2003, 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 since.
Following his meeting with Sistani, Francis is due to visit the ruins of ancient Ur in southern Iraq, revered as the birthplace of Abraham, father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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Iraqi’s gather at a church in Baghdad in anticipation of Pope Francis’ arrival
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