Defiant residents of Baghdad converged on mosques for prayers yesterday, enraged rather than cowed by US bombs.
"You can see and hear the missiles and bombs raining down on us and yet Muslims are coming to the House of God to pray," the preacher at the Mother of All Battles Mosque said.
"Your relationship with God gets stronger and stronger with every missile and every bomb your enemy drops on you."
While he spoke, the mosque compound shook as some 15 bombs and missiles crashed into an area north-west of Baghdad.
The rumble of explosions, mixed with a barrage of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, compounded the rage of worshippers but did not stop their service. Instead, preacher and worshippers began chanting Islam's rallying chant of Allahu Akbar (God is greatest).
"To you faithful: Our country is passing through the second week of a fateful Islamic battle. The war that you are fighting against the infidels - the British and Americans - is an ideological one. They want to extinguish in us the light of Islam," the preacher said.
He said the US and its allies were waging war on Baghdad as the only Arab capital that had defied their policies by "raising the banner of jihad and mobilising its army to liberate Palestine" from Israeli occupation. "They are attacking us because this country has a fighting spirit and this spirit will liberate our land from the infidels who attacked us," he said.
"Don't forget that Baghdad was the capital of the Abassid Islamic dynasty. Don't forget that from this country the Islamic armies conquered the world. From Baghdad came the best scholars and clerics," he said.
At Baghdad's Abu Hanifa mosque, the preacher said: "O God, please destroy their tanks, shoot down their planes and shake the ground under their feet."