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More than 3,500 Iraqi pilgrims in Saudi for haj

RIYADH: More than 1,200 Iraqi pilgrims have crossed by road into Saudi Arabia on their way to Mecca to perform the annual haj pilgrimage, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported on Saturday. SPA said a total of 1,255 pilgrims arrived aboard 69 buses from Iraq at the Arar border point on Friday and crossed into the kingdom.

"All the services necessary to enable them to perform the pilgrimage smoothly and peacefully were accorded to them," SPA said. It said the new arrival raised to 3,577 the total number of Iraqi pilgrims arriving by land. This is in addition to some 332 pilgrims who flew to the kingdom on two flights from Baghdad.

Iraq plans to send 7,000 pilgrims this year although it is allowed to send 22,000 under quotas set up by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to avoid overcrowding. Some two million Moslems from all over the world flock to Saudi Arabia to perform the annual pilgrimage, a pillar of the Islamic faith. Iraqi Airways head Rabaee Mohammed Saleh had said that a further three or four aircraft would take more Iraqis on their pilgrimage to Mecca in the next few days. Last year Iraq sent three planeloads of pilgrims to Saudi Arabia despite the no-fly zone in southern Iraq.

Britain says that "strictly speaking", Iraq was violating Western-imposed no-fly zones in Iraq. Iraq is under a separate United Nations air embargo as part of sweeping sanctions imposed after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

But a December 1999 Security Council resolution said Iraq could fly pilgrims to Mecca, provided the council was notified in advance of each flight. A U.N. spokesman said on Thursday that Iraq had turned down a U.N. Security Council offer to get money to thousands of Iraqi pilgrims from the proceeds of Iraqi oil sales under the so-called oil-for-food programme,

which is supervised by the United Nations. Iraq's U.N. ambassador wrote a letter to the United Nations which "essentially seems to be 'no' to the proposed arrangements as these were too late for this year's pilgrimage," U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.-Reuters