Iraqis Hungry for News of Their Homeland : Unrest: Exiled Muslim scholar tells Pomona congregation about conditions in their war-torn nation. He encourages immigrants to help topple Saddam Hussein.

The talk at the Pomona mosque was supposed to be on religious themes, but what the Iraqi immigrant congregation most wanted to hear about was politics inside their homeland.

So for a couple of hours Saturday afternoon, they listened raptly as the Ayatollah Sayed Bahrul-Uloom filled them in on the latest developments--particularly on the drive to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Shiite Muslim scholar, who is in exile in London but who occasionally slips back into Iraq as a leader of the anti-Hussein movement, told the group of about 150 men and women that Iraqis in the United States need to forget their differences and unite against Hussein’s regime.

Bahrul-Uloom also called on his countrymen abroad to be ready to help rebuild Iraq when Hussein is finally toppled.

“Saddam is not going to survive. He will fall tomorrow or the next day,” Bahrul-Uloom said to his audience in Arabic, his words repeated in English by a translator. “Anyone (overseas) who is not with the Iraqi people is a traitor.”

Bahrul-Uloom’s remarks were delivered at the Ahlul-Beyt Mosque in Pomona, where he had spent the morning taking part in a religious program. He arrived in California from Detroit, where he had participated in a conference on Iraqi affairs, according to Dr. Ridha Hajjar, an Iraqi-American physician who leads the Pomona mosque.

Bahrul-Uloom lives under a death sentence in Iraq. Nevertheless, he was in northern Iraq this fall for a meeting of about 300 opposition members and was elected to a three-member council that is helping organize anti-Hussein forces. The other members of the council are a Sunni Muslim and a Kurd.

Hajjar said Bahrul-Uloom was originally invited to talk only about religion, but the congregants’ thirst for knowledge about events in their homeland prompted the expanded presentation.

The estimated 6,000 Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans in Southern California--most in Los Angeles and San Diego counties--have seen news of their former home, which not long ago dominated foreign media coverage, in recent months take a back seat to news from such hot spots as Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Bahrul-Uloom described an Iraq in which civil order has disappeared and most of the people are suffering. He used wall maps to pinpoint trouble spots.

“Iraq in all its religions, communities and nationalities is living in turmoil with trials and tribulations,” Bahrul-Uloom said. “Saddam has filled the country with suffering and wounds.”

Particularly hard hit, he said, have been Shiite communities in southern Iran, an area over which the United Nations has forbidden Iraqi planes to fly. Uprisings in those areas during the Gulf War were brutally put down with “horror and butchery,” Bahrul-Uloom said.

In an interview before his speech, he said he intends to ask President-elect Bill Clinton to push for international relief to southern Iraq similar to that being funneled to Kurds in the northern regions of the country.

In his talk to the mosque congregation, Bahrul-Uloom said that no matter how organized Iraqis outside Iraq become, the downfall of Hussein ultimately will be brought about by the those who have remained in the country.

“The real opposition is inside Iraq, carrying their arms in the face of this tyrant,” he said.

At that point, some of those in the audience shouted “Allahu akbar, “ God is great.