Insurgent Leader Calls On Sunnis to Battle Shiite Militias

The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq railed against Iraqi leaders and paramilitary forces affiliated with Shiite Muslims and urged his fellow Sunnis to confront the rival sect, in statements from a new recording that emerged Friday.

“The Badr Brigade and Mahdi army are storming the houses of Sunnis under the pretext of searching for the mujahedin,” Abu Musab Zarqawi said. “And even if they don’t find any, they kill men and arrest women, put them in prison and rape them and steal everything from the houses of the Sunnis.”

In another section of the four-hour recording, which was posted on the Internet, Zarqawi called on Sunnis to “confront the poisonous Shiite snakes who are afflicting you,” according to an Associated Press translation.

The militant leader called Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s most prominent religious authority, an “atheist” and lambasted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is also a Shiite, for failing to follow through with his stated desire to see Israel destroyed.

Responding to the recording during a news conference with a U.S. congressional delegation, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki described Zarqawi’s thinking as the result of “a fossilized mentality that has strayed from true religion.”

According to the Associated Press, a written statement that accompanied the recording said that Zarqawi delivered the speech two months ago, but that it was only recently posted on the Internet.

The Jordanian-born Zarqawi is believed to have masterminded or facilitated dozens of attacks in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. His assaults have targeted the Iraqi government, now led by majority Shiites, as well as U.S. forces.

The recording emerged amid a surge in attacks across Iraq, with at least 100 people reported killed since Sunday.

The Health Ministry reported Friday that 657 Iraqi civilians had been killed between April 30 and May 21.

On Friday, an Iraqi soldier was killed and four others wounded in a bomb explosion in a Baghdad shopping district.

In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, gunmen assassinated an Iraqi army general and one of his bodyguards.

U.S. military sources reported that a woman died Thursday in a bombing in the northern city of Tikrit. Two Iraqi men and two American soldiers were wounded in the attack.

The continuing violence and sectarian conflict were a common theme in Friday sermons at mosques throughout Iraq. Clerics of both major sects decried the killings and blamed U.S. forces for exacerbating sectarian tensions.

“Occupation forces are the root of terrorism,” declared Sheik Ali Najafi, a Shiite, speaking in the holy city of Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad. “They themselves support terrorism and implant and set the terrorists free!”

At the Umm Qura Mosque, one of the capital’s largest Sunni houses of worship, Sheik Ahmed Abdel Ghafour warned congregants to beware of Shiite militias prowling for Sunnis who come to Baghdad’s central morgue looking for missing relatives.

“A high-ranking officer told me that he went to the morgue and saw a corpse on an empty car and when he asked about the driver and passengers, he was told they had been kidnapped,” he said.

“The big hospitals have become traps as well ... we have more than a thousand cases of people going to hospitals and being kidnapped from there.”

Ghafour said he did not blame Shiites or sectarian divisions.

“I hold the [Iraqi] government and the multinational forces responsible for what is happening,” he said.

In Kirkuk, Arabs who moved to the city under Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaign of the 1980s, in which thousands of Kurds were forcibly relocated, appeared to be making progress in talks with local Kurdish leaders over property rights.

At a Kirkuk provincial council meeting, Salah Rikabi, who claims to represent 7,000 Arab families, sought $67,000 in compensation in exchange for leaving the city.

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Times staff writers Shamil Aziz and Saif Hameed in Baghdad, special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ali Windawi in Kirkuk, and special correspondents in Baghdad and Diyala contributed to this report.