By Xinhua
Baghdad : Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi of Sunni faction visited the country’s most revered Shiitecleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, 160 km south of Baghdad, on Thursday, an official of Hashimi’s party said.
“We have decided to meet Sistani for his leading spiritual influence to the Shiite ruling alliance, and we have tackled the hardships that face the political process,” Ayad al-Samarrai, a leader in Hashimi’s Iraqi Islamic Party, said in a press release.
“This visit came after the Iraqi Islamic Party launched a political initiative dubbed (National Pact), in which we decided to communicate with all other Iraqi parties,” Samarrai said.
This visit is a strong message from the Iraqi Accordance Front to the U.S. Congress which approved Wednesday a Bosnia-style plan to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, he added.
On Wednesday, Hashimi launched a 25-item National Pact, in which he said that it carried a new outlook to stop deterioration in the war-torn country through taking up the principles of consensus and taking part in the decision making process.
The pact approved the federalism and called for recognition of the right of resistance against the occupation while differentiating between terrorism and the resistance.