When he returned to Nuristan, a group of mullahs saw the tattoo and insisted he was an infidel and could no longer pray in the mosque.
" The apology and clarification from Hattar make him no less of an infidel than his caricature," Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, one of Al Qaeda's most influential ideologues and the spiritual mentor of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the slain Jordanian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, wrote on Twitter in August.
Sitting in a sign shop festooned with banners in English that read, "Our aim is not to kill you, but our independence is more precious than your blood," Mr. Noori continued: "In our religion, the infidel has no right to relieve the oppression of believers.
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad — never," Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Mr. Hussein's prevaricating minister of information, said long after American troops had entered the city.
He claimed that "there are no American infidels in Baghdad," and said that journalists, particularly those from Al Jazeera, were lying about what they saw.
Regime mouthpieces: Defending the indefensible * During the invasion of Iraq the Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf earned the moniker "Comical Ali" for his dogged insistence that there were no "American infidels in Baghdad", even as tanks massed nearby.
To Muḥammad Aḥmad the orthodox ulama who supported the administration were no less infidels than Christians, and, when he later lashed out against misgovernment, he was referring as much to the theological heresy as to secular maladministration.
"He's my man," Mr. Bush laughingly told Tom Brokaw about the entertaining contortions of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, a k a "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob," who assured reporters, even as American tanks rumbled in, "There are no American infidels in Baghdad.
You'll see no mercy infidels.
However, for several weeks, Al Sahhaf enthralled world media with statements such as, "the Iraqi army is sending back the 'Oulouj' (the mercenaries) in body bags... back to where they had crawled from," and "there are no American infidels in Baghdad," at a time when American tanks were pouring into the Iraqi capital.
