ISTANBUL, Dec 14: The chief religious leader of Turkey accused Osama bin Laden on Friday of sinning against Islam by calling Turks “infidels” in the videotape released on Thursday.

Turkey, NATO’s only predominately Muslim member country, has cast itself as an Islamic power ideally placed to take a major role in Afghan peacekeeping.

“For a Muslim to accuse another of being an infidel is the greatest of crimes against our religion and the greatest of sins,” Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, state-appointed cleric at the head of Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs, said in televised remarks.

Foreign Minister Ismail Cem will visit Kabul next week to open a Turkish embassy and mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with the Afghan people.

But with Turkey’s trying to position itself as a bridge between east and west, many Muslims view with distaste its history of secularism and state crackdowns on religious parties.

Some Muslims both in Turkey and abroad dislike early 20th century reforms in Turkey that abolished the 1,300 year-old caliphate, removed the writ of Shariat and replaced Arabic script with Latin alphabet.

“They made a coalition against us in the winter with the infidels like the Turks, and some others, and some other Arabs,” bin Laden says at one point, according to the translation provided by the United States.

Yilmaz condemned Osama’s remarks, especially his justifications of the attacks on the United States.

“You kill innocent people and then say they deserved death. This conforms with neither humanity nor with religion.’’—Reuters