COPENHAGEN, Sept 23: East Asian and European Union leaders on Monday jointly warned the United States against unilateral military strikes on Iraq, saying any action must be backed by the United Nations.

“We stress the need for a multilateral approach to the Iraqi problem,” Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters at an Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Copenhagen.

The 25-nation group agreed to cooperate on combating international terrorism but said action must include political, economic and diplomatic measures in addition to military action.

ASEM leaders also rejected “any attempt to associate terrorism with any religion, race or nation and also reject any notion that we can be divided along these lines.”

Diplomats quoted Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammad Mahathir as warning that a war against Iraq would exacerbate tensions between Islam and the West.

The Muslims must be made to feel they had a stake in the international community, a diplomat quoted Mahathir as telling the summit.

In separate decisions, the ASEM leaders vowed joint efforts to combat new threats to global peace and security and threw their collective weight behind Japanese and South Korean efforts to end North Korea’s decades-old isolation. They urged the US to resume discussions with North Korea.