BAGHDAD — Iraq's Shiite-led government issued an arrest warrant Thursday for the country's leading Sunni Arab cleric, accusing him of colluding with insurgents, a potentially explosive charge that could exacerbate tensions between the country's warring sectarian groups and further divide a fragile national government.
The move against Harith Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars Assn., came two days after an audacious daytime kidnapping in Baghdad ruptured the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, setting Sunni politicians against Shiites.
In an appearance on state-run TV late Thursday evening, Interior Minister Jawad Bolani, a Shiite, announced that Dhari was wanted on a charge of inciting violence. "The government's policy is that anyone who tries to spread division and strife among the Iraq people will be chased by our security agencies," Bolani said.
Dhari has been a vocal, sometimes sarcastic, critic of the government, questioning the legitimacy of the criminal trials of former President Saddam Hussein and ridiculing the government's reconciliation efforts.
"The political process that the security of Iraq is depending on is a failing process, so that is why the security is failing and deteriorating," Dhari said on Al Arabiya television last weekend.
The warrant against him is virtually certain to rekindle threats of a boycott of the government by Sunni politicians. Sunnis have warned that such a walkout would have dire consequences, further entrenching an already brutal civil war and pushing more ordinary Sunnis toward the insurgency. It would also be a lethal blow to a coalition government that U.S. policymakers had hoped would pacify the hostility among Iraq's sects and ethnic groups.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad spent months persuading mainstream parties representing the once-dominant Sunni minority to join the Shiite-led government. But in recent months Shiite militiamen using the cover of the official security apparatus have waged a nightly subterranean war against Sunnis, whose bodies show up every morning in drainage ditches, bearing gunshot wounds, burn marks and other signs of torture.
On Thursday, some Sunnis sounded like they already had passed their breaking point with the government.
