Sheikh Abdul Sattar told Al-Monitor that Shiites and Sunnis coexist peacefully in Al-Azamiya and that he had been the first to visit Najaf to meet Shiite scholars after 2003. He said, “The authorities separate us and push us to be religiously biased. We demand bigger interaction from the Shiite scholars because authorities are persecuting us.”
To learn about the perspective of the Shiite party, Al-Monitor met with Jawad al-Khoui, a Shiite cleric and one of the founding members of the Iraqi Council for Interfaith Dialogue.
“We laid out our concerns to Sheikh Abdul Sattar, and we discovered that we share the same concerns. The current persecution is not initiated by one sect against the other only. All Iraqi citizens are suffering from the security and political problems weighing the country down,” Khoui noted.
“We need to be persistent in our dialogues and increase our common grounds. Najaf’s doors are open to our Sunni brothers who visit,” he added, repeating Shiite leader Ali al-Sistani’s words, “Sunnis are the same as Shiites, not only their brothers.”
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