In the mainly Shia neighbourhood of Shula in Baghdad, Sheikh Ahmad Dulaimi discards his white ammamah or turban, the symbol of Sunni Muslim clergy, when he walks in the teeming streets.
"I don't wear the ammamah when I go out because I'm afraid mosque Imams could be targeted by people who want to ignite a sectarian war," Dulaimi says.
Iraq's 26 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim but there have always been tensions between the Shia and Sunni sects of the faith. Alone among Arab countries, Iraq has a majority of Shia, about 60 percent of the population.
Tensions have been rising since the invasion of Iraq in March and the ousting of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who professed to be secular and kept a tight lid on sectarian divisions, although few Shia made it to the top ranks of his government.
A car bomb attack in the Shia holy city of Najaf in August killed more than 80 people, including one of sect's most senior leaders.
The assailants have not been identified but there were whispers among the Shia that it was the work of Sunni radicals.
Attacks on Sunni mosques followed - in some cases masked gunmen firing at Sunni priests. Again, no assailants have been identified.
In the latest attack, four worshippers were killed after Friday prayers on January 9 when a young man left a bicycle laden with explosives outside a Shia mosque in the city of Baquba in Iraq's Sunni heartland.
The bearded Sheikh Dulaimi, from the Sunni city of Ramadi to the west of Baghdad, said pre-war tolerance helped him live for 25 years in the predominantly Shia neighbourhood where he preached in one of the district's few Sunni mosques.
The first thing to be discarded was the ammamah, a white turban sometimes tied with a red tarbush or cap. Dulaimi rarely wears it in public now - Shia clergy usually wear black turbans and his white ammamah would mark him out as a Sunni priest.
"I am feeling uneasy. I expect anyone anywhere to come and attack me," Dulaimi said, sitting on the carpeted floor in the main hall of his mosque. He said his weekly sermons, more than ever before, were focused on promoting unity.
Clerics from both sides say attacks on clergy could lead to civil war.
"When a cleric is assassinated it's not like an ordinary man," said Shia cleric Haider Husseini. "It raises passions and shows that the killings mean to sow dissent."
In the mainly Sunni area of Ghazaliyah, just south of Dulaimi's neighbourhood, a mourning service is held for Shia Muslim cleric Sheikh Wissam Jassem al-Fawadi, gunned down in late December as he drove to perform dawn prayers.
Community elders and clerics urged restraint as mourners cried for revenge at the mosque where Fawadi preached.
"Only infidel Americans and their ally Israel would gain from Muslim bloodletting," Sheikh Ali al-Fawadi, a relative of the murdered cleric, told the agitated crowd.
"The growing enemies of Islam want to divide Muslims in this country to destabilise Iraq. The last card they are using is the sectarian civil war," the cleric said.
Communal peace has been strained by widespread perceptions among Shia that Sunnis sympathise with Saddam and a Sunni prejudice that Shia have become collaborators with the US-led occupation.
Sunni anger is fuelled by fear that US plans for a transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis will give Shia dominance.
So far the Shia religious establishment in the holy city of Najaf - the Hawza - which wields influence over the community, has counselled peace.
"There are ignorant people who want to take revenge but our clerics are forbidding us and say those who sow dissent God will send them to hell," said Hussein Khafaji, also a relative of the slain cleric.
Alarm over the killings has prodded both Sunni and Shia clerics across the country to deliver joint sermons and urge Muslim unity, and use tribal ties and religious rulings to restrain hotheads.
Sheikh Abdul Razak Hanar, a Sunni cleric in Ghazaliyah, says his message to worshippers was to maintain calm in the face of provocation by extremists.
"We tell our worshippers...you may hear provocative talk or threats and you have to act with reason," Hanar said. Iraq, he said, had to be united to survive.
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