Iran's opposition leaders appealed on Saturday to top clerics in the holy city of Qom to help stop the ruling Islamic regime's violent postelection crackdown - reaching out to the one group that could go head-to-head with the country's supreme leader, AP reported.
The reformists compared the regime's crackdown to that of the late shah of Iran, remembered in the country for his brutal secret police, with one opposition leader even tactics were worse than those used by the Israelis against the Palestinians.
Iran's opposition maintains that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 elections from opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi by engaging in massive fraud, but its demonstrations have been ruthlessly suppressed leaving hundreds, if not thousands, in prison.
The opposition has been hampered by the firm backing given the president and his election win by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in Iran's Islamic republic has the final say in all state matters.
A possible counterweight to Khamenei's wide-ranging powers, however, is the moral authority of nine clerics in the holy city of Qom that are "marja' taqlid," or sources of emulation for Iran's Shiites.
Traditionally, these clerics, who have huge spiritual influence over Iranians, have stayed out of Iran's religious-based politics and they routinely congratulated each winner of the presidential election.
This time, however, only one has done so, while three others have spoken out against the violent crackdown against the hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters who took to the streets to protest the alleged election fraud.