Baghdad, Iraq ? The most feared terrorist group in Iraq threatened Wednesday to execute Egypt’s top diplomat, who was seized in Baghdad last weekend.

Al-Qaida’s Iraq branch also announced the formation of a special brigade to fight members of the Badr Brigade, a former Shiite Muslim militia linked to a leading Shiite political party in Iraq, a move that could increase already high sectarian tensions.

Al-Qaida posted Egyptian diplomat Ihab al-Sherif’s identification cards on a Web site that militants frequently use, four days after he was kidnapped from his upscale Baghdad neighborhood. The group later posted a statement saying that al-Sherif was the ally of “Jews and Christians” and that al-Qaida’s religious court would “carry out the punishment of apostasy against him.”

Al-Sherif was to be the first Arab ambassador to Iraq after the Egyptian government decided to upgrade its representation to a full diplomatic mission. The statement directly linked his kidnapping and death threat to the Egyptian government’s decision to recognize the Iraqi government and “to send an ambassador to Iraq upon the suggestion of the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Al-Qaida’s statement, which couldn’t be immediately verified, heightened fears in the Muslim and Arab diplomatic community, already shaken by two attacks on high-ranking diplomats from Pakistan and Bahrain. The terrorist group called embassies “intelligence offices” rife with spies that hinder al-Qaida from functioning and communicating.

An Iraqi boy looks inside a bullet-riddled and bloodstained taxi abandoned on a highway in Baghdad, Iraq. The car belonged to the boy's uncle, who was shot and killed Wednesday, allegedly by U.S. military, according to family members.

Earlier Wednesday, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who leads al-Qaida’s Iraq branch, said Iraqi police and soldiers were as great an enemy as American troops, according to an audiotape aired on Arabic-language satellite channels.

Though al-Zarqawi and his mainly Sunni Muslim foot soldiers have long targeted Iraq’s predominantly Shiite security forces, the purported creation of the “Omar Brigade” is his most organized effort yet to combat the powerful Badr Brigade.

Two car bombs ripped through the predominantly Shiite city of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, early in the evening, killing 13 people and wounding 27. The explosions occurred simultaneously in different parts of town, one at a crowded outdoor marketplace and the other at a car dealership, according to the Interior Ministry.

Two Fort Riley soldiers were killed Tuesday in separate incidents in Iraq, the Defense Department said Wednesday.

Spc. Christopher W. Dickison, 26, of Seattle, died in Baqubah, northwest of Baghdad, when a roadside bomb exploded near his patrol. Dickison was assigned to the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 34th Armor, 1st Infantry Division.

Pvt. Anthony M. Mazzarella, 22, of Blue Springs, Mo., was killed in Taji on the outskirts of Baghdad when the Humvee he was riding in accidentally rolled over. Mazzarella was assigned to the Army’s 1st Battalion, 13th Armor, 1st Armor Division.

The two men were the 53rd and 54th soldiers from Fort Riley killed in Iraq.

Approximately 4,300 soldiers from Fort Riley are deployed in Iraq.