French architect to build giant mosque for Saddam

Copyright 1998 by Agence France-Presse
 Wed, 15 Apr 1998 

PARIS, April 15 (AFP) - With its eight minaret towers thrusting several 
hundred feet (metres) into the air above the city, the new Baghdad mosque 
will be the biggest in the world.

President Saddam Hussein's plan for a new mosque in the Iraqi capital will 
surpass even the holiest site in the Moslem world, the mosque in the Saudi 
city of Mecca which can only boast seven minarets.

The four highest minarets, to be built 280 metres (925 feet) tall in a 
square formation, will be "the highest in the world, in order to be closer 
to God, according to the wishes of Saddam Hussein," the French architect 
chosen to oversee the project, Jacques Barriere, told AFP.

Worshippers will be given no room for doubt over the identity of the 
project's instigator. As they enter the mosque, they will be faced with a 
huge digital image of Saddam, facing in the direction of Mecca and 
accompanied by his signature.

The announcement of the project to build the Saddam Grand Mosque last 
Thursday highlighted once again the Iraqi president's desire to establish 
himself as a leader of the Arab world, despite his status as a pariah in 
the West.

The waters of the river Tigris will be diverted to form an artificial lake 
surrounding the mosque, Barrierre said, water being the symbol of purity.

Pathways across the lake will allow visitors to walk around an outline 
representing the contours of the Arab world.

The scale of the project is immense. The concrete mosque itself will be 
135 metres (445 feet) in diameter and 120 metres (almost 400 feet) high, 
Barriere said. It is to be built on thirty hectares (75 acres) of land on 
the site of an old airport bombed during the 1991 Gulf War.

"The project features a rectangular perimeter 480 metres (1,580 feet) wide 
and 700 metres (2,310 feet) long, where there will be buildings used as 
libraries, souks, residential buildings for students and a Koranic school," 
said Barriere.

The cost is immaterial for the Iraqi regime, said the architect based in 
Limoges, central France.

"It will cost what it will cost. It's not so much the price that counts as 
the technical achievement."

It is an attitude that contrasts starkly with the miserable living standards 
for most ordinary citizens in Baghdad, where crippling UN sanctions 
targetted at Saddam's regime have resulted in food and medicine shortgaes.

A mass funeral was held in Baghdad Monday for 29 children the government 
says died as a direct result of sanctions and a lack of medicines. It was 
the latest in a series of mass funerals aimed to mobilize public opinion 
against the crippling
economic embargo.

However the building falls outside the range of the sanctions, Barriere 
said.

"We examined the United Nations' Resolution 986 to know if we could go ahead 
with it or not," he said. "But intellectual projects totally escape the 
embargo."

Iraqi authorities approached Barriere and his colleagues last September 
following their work on a giant obelisk in Paris to mark the bicentenary 
of a French scientific expedition to Egypt.