Iraqi dailies denounce Saudi Arabia

The Iraqi daily al-Joumhurieyah on Sunday denounced Saudi Arabia and held it responsible for preventing some 18,000 Iraqis from performing al-Haj rituals for this year, on the sidelines of what the papers referred to as Saudi Arabia's implementation of US schemes.

The Iraqi paper added that the Saudi authorities had a "cunning" policy with the objective of deception over what had been agreed upon. The paper claimed that King Fahd donated all spending to be made by the Iraqi pilgrimages in order to provoke sectarianism among the pilgrims, saying, "The Iraqis would not have accepted charity from anyone because this is in contradiction with their dignity as Arabs."

Other Iraqi dailies including the al-Joumhuriyah, al-Thawra and al-Qaseseyah front-paged this news condemning the Saudi attitude towards the Iraqi pilgrims.