Iraq Update: Al-Sadr Calls for Peaceful "Resistance" Against US "Occupiers" (Al Jazeera)

UPDATE 1200 GMT: Clarifying the use of "peaceful" in the headline, this is Reuters' report on the speech:

Sadr said occupiers should be resisted "by all means" but added that arms were for "people of weapons only," a comment that seemed to endorse the authority of the army and the police and could calm fears of a return of the [Sadrist militia] Mehdi Army.

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Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who returned to Iraq on Wednesday after an absence of more than four years (see separate analysis), has given his first public speech in Najaf. Al Jazeera reports:

Thousands of Iraqis have turned out in the central Iraqi city of Najaf to hear Muqtada al-Sadr's first speech since his return from four years of self-imposed exile.

The Shia Muslim religious leader called the US, Israel and the UK "common enemies" against Iraq in his speech on Saturday , and urged his followers to resist what he called "the occupiers" by all means.

"Yes, yes for Muqtada! Yes, yes for the leader!" the crowd shouted, waving Iraqi flags and al-Sadr's pictures.

Police and al-Sadr's guards were out in force in Al-Hanana, the area of Najaf where al-Sadr's home is located, and where he spoke.

Al-Sadr gained widespread popularity among Shias in the months after the 2003 US-led invasion, and his Mahdi Army militia later battled American and Iraqi government forces in several bloody confrontations.

But in August 2008, he suspended the activities of the Mahdi Army, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, after major US and Iraqi assaults on its strongholds in Baghdad and southern Iraq in the spring.

Al-Sadr left Iraq at the end of 2006, according to his movement, and had reportedly been pursuing religious studies in the Iranian holy city of Qom. He returned to his home city of Najaf on Wednesday.