BAGHDAD - Iraq's main Sunni Arab religious authority, the Committee of Muslim Scholars, has condemned a call by Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for "total war" against the majority Shiites.
"What Zarqawi said is very dangerous and plays into the hands of the occupier who wants to split up the country and spark a sectarian war," the committee said in a statement received by AFP on Friday.
The Sunni body, while renewing its calls for dialogue with the rebels, urged the Jordanian-born Zarqawi to retract his statement.
"From a religious point of view, you must renounce your threat because it abuses the image of Jihad (holy war)," the statement said.
Zarqawi, who claimed responsibility for a wave of car bomb attacks in Baghdad, including one Wednesday on Shiites waiting to be hired as day labourers, has declared war on the majority community and its government.
He also warned all other religious and tribal groups that they should join his campaign or also face attack.
"Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Land of Two Rivers is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha (a pejorative term for Shiites), wherever they are in Iraq," according to an audiotape attributed to him and posted on the Internet Wednesday.
Zarqawi, who has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, also urged Sunni Arabs to "wake up from your slumber", warning that otherwise "the war to exterminate Sunnis will never end".
"Iraq's Shiites are not responsible for the government's sectarian policy," the Committee of Ulemas said.
"And they are not responsible for the Tal Afar operation," it added, referring to an ongoing US-Iraqi offensive against the northwestern town which had been under rebel control for the past few months.
Zarqawi's group said Wednesday's carnage in Baghdad, where some 80 people - mostly Shiite construction workers - were killed in a single suicide car bombing, was to avenge the offensive on Tal Afar.
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