Iraqi government yesterday blamed al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for a series of church bombings that killed at least 11 people, saying the aim was to spark religious strife and drive Christians out of the country.

Muslim leaders condemned the car bombings that were timed for Sunday evening services in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul. The attacks were the first on churches of the minority Christian community since the start of a 15-month insurgency. “There is no shadow of a doubt that this bears the blueprint of Zarqawi,” said national security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie. “Zarqawi and his extremists are basically trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and Christians in Iraq. It's clear they want to drive Christians out of the country,” he told Reuters.

The Jordanian-born militant has claimed responsibility for many major car bombings in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted last year and also the killing of foreign hostages.

Rubaie said Iraq's national security council would hold an emergency meeting yesterday to discuss the blasts that hit at least five churches in the country, including four in Baghdad.

The car bomb attacks near the four Baghdad churches killed 10 people and wounded more than 40, the US military said, adding the blasts occurred within a 30 minute period.

Witnesses and officials had said earlier that as many as 15 people had been killed, including at least one person killed by a bomb at a church in Mosul. The US statement gave no details of casualties from Mosul. It said Iraqi police had found and cleared an explosive device that contained 15 mortar rounds outside a fifth Baghdad church.

<B>Muslim leaders respond</B>

Christians account for about three percent of the population of Iraq, where attempts to provoke conflict have mainly focused on Sunni Muslims and members of the Shi'ite Muslim majority, who were oppressed by Saddam.

There are about 800,000 Christians in Iraq, most of them in Baghdad. Several recent attacks have targeted alcohol sellers throughout Iraq, most of whom are Christians of either the Assyrian, Chaldean or Armenian denominations.

Adnan al-Asadi, a senior member of the Shi'ite Dawa Islamic party, said Muslims shared the pain of the Christian community. “We reject these criminal acts which want to create religious and sectarian strife in Iraq,” he said.

“We do not differentiate between these acts which are in violation of religious and Islamic laws because the perpetrators of these acts ... are the same people who strike Iraqi mosques and centres for the internal security forces.”

In March, coordinated suicide bombings during a Shi’ite religious ceremony killed more than 170 in Baghdad and Kerbala. The US military says a computer disk captured earlier this year contained a letter from Zarqawi calling for attacks on Iraqi Shi'ites to try to spark sectarian conflict in Iraq.

Washington has put a $25 million price on his head. The US military has warned that guerrillas opposed to the presence of more 160,000 foreign troops may try to deepen divisions between the country's diverse religious communities in their campaign to destabilise Iraq.

<B>Act of “Barbarity”</B>

Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin said the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was trying its best to combat the insurgents and uproot their networks.

“This shows there are no borders to the barbarity of the crimes of these terrorists,” he said in response to the attacks. “No believer of any religion would do this.”

The Vatican has also condemned the church blasts. Parish priest Bashar Muntihorda, speaking outside a Chaldean church in Baghdad that was hit, said Christians were devastated.

“The damage that was done is so high to the courage of the poeple, to their feelings, to their hopes that a bright future is coming,” Muntihorda said, as volunteers swept up debris, including a broken stained glass window of Jesus Christ.

Adding to Iraq's burden has been a wave of hostage taking. There were conflicting reports late on Sunday over the fate of three Indians, three Kenyans and an Egyptian taken last month and threatened with execution.

In Nairobi, Kenyan Foreign Minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere said that guerrillas had released the seven hostages. But their Kuwaiti employers and an Iraqi mediator negotiating their release said they were still in captivity.

Scores of hostages from two dozen countries have been seized by kidnappers in the last four months. Most have been freed but several have been executed – at least four were beheaded.

<B>Dean Yates</B>