Baghdad, Iraq ? The Shiite-led Interior Ministry issued an arrest warrant Thursday for the top leader of the country’s Sunni minority – a move certain to inflame already raging sectarian violence in Iraq.

Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, a Shiite, announced on state television that Harith al-Dhari was wanted for inciting terrorism and violence among the Iraqi people.

Al-Dhari, head of the influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, is an extreme hard-liner who recently mocked a government offer of reconciliation in return for abandoning the insurgency. But the move against him threatens to drive many moderate Sunnis out of the political system.

Already, moderate Sunnis have been threatening for weeks to leave the government and take up arms. If that happens, it likely would lead to a full-fledged civil war and make it much harder for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq.

The warrant was issued on a day when at least 49 Iraqis died violently and the U.S. military announced the deaths of four more American soldiers. Sunnis and Shiites could not agree on whether all hostages had been released from a mass abduction in Baghdad two days earlier, and one man said he’d been beaten by the kidnappers.

In southern Iraq, a convoy of civilians traveling near Nasiriyah was hijacked Thursday, according to Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. He said preliminary reports suggested there could be as many as 14 people captured and that the convoy included about 19 vehicles. ABC News reported that four of those captured were believed to be Americans.

An Iraqi sits next to a destroyed car following an explosion in Baghdad, Iraq. Deadly attacks continued Thursday in the capital, with suspected insurgents and militias using guns, bombs and mortar shells. At least 49 Iraqis died violently Thursday, and the U.S. announced the deaths of four soldiers.

Nasiriyah is the capital of Dhi Qar province, where Italy formally handed over security responsibility to Iraqi forces in late September.

Mohammed Bashar al-Faidi, spokesman for the Sunni association, condemned the warrant for al-Dhari’s arrest.

“This government should resign before the Iraqi people force it to resign,” al-Faidi told Al-Jazeera television from Jordan. “The association calls on its people to be calm.”

Al-Faidi accused the interior minister “of supporting terrorism by covering for (Shiite) militias that are killing the Iraqi people.”

Earlier this year, the Sunni association blamed the Interior Ministry for the killing of a nephew and cousin of al-Dhari. Their bodies were found in a bullet-riddled vehicle in Baghdad.

Al-Dhari regularly travels between Iraq and the Persian Gulf states, as well as Syria, Jordan and Egypt. He was believed to be in Jordan when the arrest warrant was issued Thursday night.

Al-Dhari, who is about 65, is an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government and the U.S. occupation. On Tuesday, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, called him a hard-liner with “nothing to do but incite sectarian and ethnic sedition.”

There is precedent for an arrest warrant leading to violence in Iraq.

In April 2004, a U.S. warrant against radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr prompted a two-week uprising by his Mahdi Army militia. Hundreds were killed.

Al-Maliki, despite heavy pressure from the United States, has done nothing to wipe out the Mahdi Army. Its benefactor, al-Sadr, is a key backer of the prime minister.

The Mahdi Army was believed responsible for kidnapping scores of people from a Higher Education Ministry office building Tuesday in Baghdad.

The aftermath of that mass abduction has turned into a propaganda war.

On Thursday, the Sunni higher education minister called the Interior Ministry “a farce” for not preventing the crime and claimed more than half the 150 victims were still in the hands of Shiite abductors.

But National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, a Shiite, said everyone had been freed and accused Arab satellite broadcasters and Western media of hostile reporting to incite sectarian hatred in Iraq.

Within hours, however, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, was amending that account, saying all the Higher Education Ministry employees were free but that others taken from the building were still hostages. He gave no numbers.