Al Qaeda in Iraq’s new leader warned Shia on Friday that “dark days soaked with blood” lie ahead and that a new campaign of attacks was under way.
The warning comes just days after Iraq was wracked by the worst attack this year, a series of coordinated bombings and assassinations that killed 119 people — most of them Shia and members of the security forces — across 10 cities.
The Iraqi insurgent umbrella group, the Islamic State of Iraq, named al-Nasser Lideen Allah Abu Suleiman as its new minister of war, replacing the Egyptian Abu Ayyub al-Masri, killed in a US-Iraqi military strike on a safe house in April.
The ISI counts Al Qaeda as one of its member groups.
“Wait for the long gloomy nights and dark days soaked with blood,” said Abu Suleiman, addressing Iraq’s “polytheistic rejecters,” an insulting term for Shia common among extremist Sunnis.
“What is happening to you nowadays is just a drizzle,” he added. One of the major doctrinal disputes between Sunnis and Shia can be traced back to the first three rulers of the Muslim community after the Prophet Mohammed.