In an Internet address rebroadcast on satellite television networks, Al Qaeda's chief in Iraq and car bomb expert Abu Hamza Al Muhajer told his followers to each kill at least one American within two weeks.
Sunni preachers distanced themselves from the message, but it stirred tensions as violence killed 11 people around the country and the health ministry confirmed that 1,584 people were killed in Baghdad last month.
Three of the dead were Shiite pilgrims killed by a mortar attack as they headed to the Shiite holy city of Karbala for a religious festival.
In a video posted on an Islamist Website, Muhajer called on supporters of the leaders of the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda Islamist networks. "Oh followers of Mullah Mohammed Omar, sons of Osama Bin Laden, disciples of Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi ... I urge each of you to kill at least one American within a period not exceeding 15 days," he said.
Muhajer, also known as Abu Ayyub Al Masri, has been branded an "expert in vehicle bombs" by the US military and took over as Al Qaeda's head in Iraq after a US air strike killed his predecessor Zarqawi on June 7.
Iraqi and US authorities have accused Al Qaeda of triggering a bloody Shiite-Sunni sectarian war across the country since February, a key factor in the carnage that grips the region around the capital.
In response, the Iraq branch of Al Qaeda said Friday it was launching "a new conquest" in line with a request from Muhajer for Sunnis to kill Americans and Shiites. "In response to the call of Sheikh Abu Hamza Al Muhajer, the lions of the Mujahideen Consultative Council have launched a new conquest, in revenge" for Zarqawi's killing, it said in a statement.
Earlier, conservative Sunni preacher Sheikh Zakariya Al Tamimi told followers after giving the sermon at west Baghdad's Ibn Taymiyah mosque that Muhajer "speaks only for himself, not all the Sunnis."
In his sermon, though, Tamimi railed against an Iraqi government that could not be trusted while Shiite militias roamed the streets killing Sunnis, asking the administration "to heal itself."
For his part, the Shiite cleric Ahmed Al Safi Al Karbalayi said in his sermon at Karbala's Imam Hussein shrine that militias would remain necessary as long as the government could not protect its own people. "Arms should be put in the hands of the state and the state should be able to protect the citizen, otherwise popular organizations shall be formed to defend themselves," he said.
At the root of the problem is the continuing sectarian killing between the two communities, especially in mixed areas like Diyala, Baghdad and Babil provinces where sectarian killings are an almost daily occurrence.
The health ministry said the Baghdad mortuary received 1,584 bodies of people killed in violent attacks in August, a 14 percent decrease from the 1,850 killings it reported in the capital in July.
The figures fly in the face of Thursday's statement by the US forces' chief spokesman Major General William Caldwell that August's "murder rate in Baghdad dropped 52 percent from the daily rate for July."
However, another coalition spokesman said on Friday that the US military figure for murders does not include those killed in Baghdad's daily toll of suicide bombings and mortar attacks on crowded civilian areas.
Even as the security push "Operation Together Forward" put more than 30,000 US and Iraqi troops on the streets of Baghdad, the number of violent deaths in July was the highest in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003.
Adding fuel to the fire is also the debate between the two communities over the political future of Iraq, with parties representing the Shiite majority pushing a law which would give them control of an autonomous zone in the oil-rich south.
Many in the formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority fiercely oppose such a regional decentralization of Iraq, fearing it will leave them with only barren parts of central Iraq and the vast desert of western Anbar province.
Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki Thursday signed an accord with General George Casey, head of coalition forces in Iraq, to begin to take charge of Iraq's armed forces which hitherto reported to Casey. The accord brought Iraq's tiny air force and navy and one of its 10 army divisions under Maliki's command.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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