LAHORE, April 16: The Difa-i-Islam Mahaz, a 15-party Sunni alliance, held a rally on The Mall here on Wednesday to protest against the Anglo-American occupation of Baghdad.

Hundreds of activists, mostly students of religious seminaries, chanted slogans against the two aggressors as they marched from Nasser Bagh to the Faisal Square (Charing Cross). They included a small group of women, who also belonged to a seminari.

The riot police had set up barricades at the GPO Chowk, but the demonstrators broke through the barrier to reach the Faisal Square, where two constituents of the alliance clashed with each other over the question of leading the rally.

Three people were hurt in the clash, but the police did not intervene in the matter.

Speaking on the occasion, MMA president and chief of his own faction of the JUP, Senator Shah Ahmad Noorani, said the best Jihad was to dry up the fountains of evil in the corridors of power.

He said Muslims rulers were hypocrites, isolated from their nations. He pledged to continue the struggle against such rulers until a leadership emerged that could play the role of Ghauri and Ghaznavi.

He did not believe that Baghdad had fallen to Anglo-American forces, and argued that the fight was still on. He said that like Afghanistan, Iraq would also become a graveyard of the aggressive forces.

Warning the Indian rulers against any misadventure in Pakistan, Dr Sarfraz Naeemi said Islamabad was not Baghdad, Tehran or Damascus and had the capability to thwart any aggression.

Pir Afzal Qadri regretted that no Muslim country had observed a mourning day over the fall of Baghdad. Declaring rulers of the 50-plus Muslim states as brazen-faced, he warned them that a conspiracy had been hatched to hand over a piece of land between Khyber and Madina in Saudi Arabia to Jews.

Saudi and Pakistani leaders were responsible for defending the sacred sites, the former as custodian of the sites and the latter as the only nuclear power among the Muslim states, he said.

Engineer Saleemullah Khan demanded that an OIC session should be convened to adopt a joint strategy for defending Muslim states against the anti-Muslim forces, which, he said, were now ready to target Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.