Baath Party urges the resistance to focus on Iran and America, avoiding "sectarian provocations"

The Iraqi Baath party, in a statement following the execution of Barzan al-Tikriri and Awad Bandar, summarized in Al-Quds al-Arabi, today Thursday January 18, condemned the executions as further crimes by the joint American-Iranian occupation designed to inflame civil war, and stressed the following point:

The spirit of hatred against Arabs and Arabism is the main common characteristic in the Iranian-American alliance in Iraq....[The executions will eventually be avenged; however] The important and basic thing for the party and for the resistance at the present time is the liberation of Iraq and not being turned aside from this aim in any way, whatever the two American and Iranian occupations may do to try and draw Iraqis into a civil war. For this reason we urge the people of our great Iraq to avoid the machinations of the occupation, and not be drawn into sectarian temptations even if they are dressed up as revenge for the execution of the martyrs and as a response to the crimes and provocations of the Safavid sectarians. These represent the ambitions of the Persians, and not of the Alawi Shiia ["Alawi" being used here possibly in a general sense--the word originally comes from the name of Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed-- as a way of referring to Shiites or some Shiites as true Muslims, as opposed to other terms that imply they are not]. The killer of our heros is America and Iran, and not any true Iraqi, in the final analysis it is Iranian intelligence and its agents of Iranian origin. Our people must remember this, and focus all of their attacks and their responses against the Iranian and the American occupations, avoiding all sectarian provocations, and in response always adhering to the national bond that unites all of the Iraqi people from the south to the north, and not sectarian rhetoric.