“The world should know that they (the Boko Haram members) are stranger to Islam and are not Muslims at all,” Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi said in Iran’s central city of Qom on Sunday.
The top cleric noted that those African militants are disowned by the Muslim world, and added, “We believe they are savage people whom should not be even called human beings.”
Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi further called for vigilance in the face of such “irrational” violent groups, warning that the enemies of Islam in the West may start mounting an anti-Islam propaganda campaign under the pretext that the Boko Haram militants are Muslims.
The Boko Haram, a terrorist group acting in Nigeria, has been fighting for five years, carrying out bombings and attacks on civilians and the security forces in the African country.
Last month, the notorious armed group kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria.
Public outrage has been growing over the mass abduction of the Nigerian schoolchildren.
In the meantime, West African leaders on Saturday agreed to work together to wage "total war" on Boko Haram, saying the group had become a regional al-Qaeda that threatened all of them.