by Mujahid Mohammed
TALL AFAR, Iraq, Sept 10 (AFP) - Top Sunni Muslim clerics slammed the US-led coalition on Friday for waging "genocide" in Iraq, after US-led air and ground assaults on insurgents in Tall Afar and Fallujah killed at least 57 people.
Meanwhile, militants loyal to Al-Qaeda`s number two purportedly gave Italy 24 hours to promise to release Muslim women prisoners in Iraq in exchange for details about two Italian hostages, as Rome ploughed on with a diplomatic mission to save the aid workers.
A statement attributed to the Ansar al-Zawahiri group appeared after Osama bin Laden`s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned in a video on Al-Jazeera television that US defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan was only "a matter of time."
Tall Afar was sealed off as US-led operations to rid the northern town of "terrorists" continued and which Sheikh Abdel Ghaffur al-Samarrai told worshippers qualified as genocide.
"What have the residents of Fallujah and Tall Afar done to deserve these atrocities? The occupation forces are committing genocide," he said.
"They came to Iraq to kill, destroy and strip its resources. Where is the UN Security Council?" asked the member of Iraq`s exclusive Committee of Ulema.
Calm hung over Tall Afar, 75 kilometres (47 miles) from the Syrian border after a 13-hour air and ground assault on Thursday that medics said left 45 people dead. The US military said up to 57 "terrorists" were killed.
In the main northern city of Mosul, Sheikh Salah al-Jaburi also accused the US-led coalition forces of committing an "enormous" crime.
"These savage bombardments make no distinction between unarmed civilians and those equipped with weapons," he said.
US-led Iraqi forces have sealed off the town, a suspected bastion of foreign fighters from Syria, for more than 24 hours. Dozens of residents, many of them women and children, have fled to a makeshift Iraqi Red Crescent camp.
Only ambulances were allowed in and out, after passing first a US and then an Iraqi national guard checkpoint, while the military said operations "to establish security and eliminate terrorist activities" were continuing.
Defence officials in Washington said such air strikes and cordon-and-search operations would gradually reassert control over turbulent Sunni areas that have become havens for insurgents.
As Iraq`s endemic hostage crisis rumbled on, Ansar al-Zawahiri issued Rome with a chilling threat, saying the fate of two women hostages would never be known unless Italy freed women prisoners in Iraq.
"We ask Italy to promise unconditionally to release all Muslim women prisoners from Iraqi prisons. In turn we will give a little information about the Italian female hostages," said a statement posted on the Internet.
Its authenticity was impossible to verify.
"The Italian government has 24 hours to reply to our demands, otherwise Italian people will never discover the fate of the Italian women hostages."
It was not immediately clear how many, if any, Iraqi women are being held in Italian-supervised detention facilities in the strife-torn country.
Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar met Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Rome as Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Italy would not change its foreign policy under pressure from hostage-takers.
"At a time of new blackmail, it is obvious that the Italian government will not change track," he told the conservative weekly Panorama.
Junior Foreign Minister Margherita Boniver was due in Jordan on Friday after earlier visits to Cairo and Beirut in a desperate bid to help free Simona Pari and Simon Torretta, both aged 29, snatched on Tuesday.
Australia`s prime minister also refused to withdraw troops from Iraq after Islamic militants threatened new attacks following the bombing of Canberra`s embassy in Indonesia unless he abandoned the US-led force in Baghdad.
"We will not have our foreign policy or our security policy determined by terrorist threats," said John Howard, after the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group purportedly delivered the threats.
Back on the ground, an Iraqi refuse collector was killed clearing rubble from an earlier US air raid that killed 12, when an American warplane fired a missile into the notorious insurgent bastion of Fallujah, one of his colleagues said.