Islamabad, June 27: Powerful Islamic parties today angrily reacted to President Pervez Musharraf's conditional pledge to agree to a United States request to send troops to Iraq. Musharraf, during this week's visit to the US, reiterated an earlier statement that he supported "in principle" sending Pakistani troops to join a post-war peacekeeping force, provided it was under the auspices of the united nations, the Organisation of Islamic conference or the Gulf cooperation council.


"This is an alarming situation," Professor Khurshid Ahmad, a federal senator from Pakistan's largest Islamic Party Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), said in a statement.

"It seems that America is trying to pressurise Pakistan to send its forces to Iraq."
JI is a leader of the six-party fundamentalist coalition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which dominates the federal opposition and rules the two western border provinces, North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan.


MMA campaigned heavily at October polls on an anti-us platform, exploiting popular resent at Pakistan's support of the US-led assault on neighbouring Afghanistan's Taliban regime. It won a massive vote swing.


The religious parties fervently opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq and staged some of Pakistan's largest ever rallies in protest, portraying the operation to unseat Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as an attack on the Muslim world.
Bureau Report