"Those who are targeting our national unity using faith as an excuse… they are the elements of the enemy," the Leader said in the western Iranian city of Sanandaj on Tuesday.

"Those who try to sow discord among Shia and Sunni are mercenaries of the enemy, whether they realize it or not," Ayatollah Khamenei told the large crowd gathered for the speech.

"The miserable Salafi and Wahhabi groups who are fed petro-dollars to carry out terrorist acts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, many of them are not aware that they are mercenaries of the enemy."

Speaking in the Kurd and Sunni majority province of Kurdestan, Ayatollah Khamenei went on to say that Shias who insult Sunni beliefs, and vice versa, are also working for the interests of world powers and adversaries of Islam.

Wahhabism, an extremist sect that brands Shia and some other non-Wahhabi Muslims as infidels, is considered by many Muslims as pseudo-Sunni Islam.

It is also the belief system that leaders of groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda seek to promote.

Comments made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a congressional hearing confirm that Washington supports these groups to pursue its own regional interests.

"And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union," she said on the Taliban's creation in the 1980s.

During the Tuesday speech, Iran's most senior official also said that the Iranian nation would defend its territorial integrity against world powers which do not want a united Iran.

Kurdestan is the Iranian province where PJAK separatists, offshoots of the internationally-recognized terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), seek to gain ground by carrying out violent attacks.

According to a November 2006 article published by The New Yorker, the US military and Israel provide PJAK with equipment, training and vital intelligence to destabilize the Iranian government.

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