A bit dif­fer­ent ver­sion of “jour­nal­ists meet Sis­tani” on Al-Fatehoon than the one reported on LAtimes.

Al-Fatehoon says that in the meet­ing Sis­tani spoke Per­sian and his son Mohammed Ridha trans­lated to Arabic.

Accord­ing to news site source [a jour­nal­ist present in the meet­ing], it seemed that Sis­tani spoke few words and short sen­tences but the trans­la­tion was longer than what Sis­tani spoke. Mohammed Ridha used polit­i­cal words and phrases like an expe­ri­enced politician.

Leave this Sis­tani meet­ing and read what Al-Qabas wrote about Sistani’s role in the SOFA agreement:

The supreme reli­gious author­ity, Aya­tol­lah Ali Al-Sistani — accord­ing to informed sources — fol­lows the agree­ment issue and asked to study it carefully.

The source pointed out that he recently expressed reser­va­tions on some arti­cles related to Iraq’s sovereignty.

This theme fit exactly what Nahrain­net reported two days ago that Maliki was forced to refuse the agree­ment recently because of Sistani’s pressure:

When Maliki wanted to shake Sistani’s hand, Sis­tani said:

I don’t want this hand to sign an agree­ment to remain in dis­grace of the his­tory of Iraq.

The posi­tion of other three supreme cler­ics is very clear; they rejected the agree­ment in their statements.