Al-Qaeda number two lashes out at Bush, pope, West
By Sharon Gorani,WNS UAE Bureau Chief
DUBAI - Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Al-Qaeda number two, on Friday called US President George W. Bush a liar who had "failed in his war against Al-Qaeda", and launched a scathing verbal attack on western targets including the pope and the United Nations. The Qatar-based Arabic-language satellite station Al-Jazeera said that in a video posted on the Internet, "Zawahiri called Bush a liar and said he had failed in his war against Al-Qaeda".
On Thursday, Islamist websites on the Internet had said there would be a new video message posted by Zawahiri entitled " Bush, the pope, Darfur and the Crusades." Al-Jazeera said that Zawahiri branded Pope Benedict XVI an "imposter for his attitude to Islam and the Arab world." Zawahari was referring to the pope's recent speech in Germany in which, critics say, the head of the Roman Catholic Church seemed to link Islam and violence. The pope's September 12 speech in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who equated Islam with violence has touched off a furor in the Muslim world.
Also in the video message, the righthand man to Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden called for a holy war in Sudan's Darfur region against the "crusaders... of the UN," according to Al-Jazeera. Zawahiri called for "Muslims to join a jihad in Darfur against the forces of the crusaders related to the United Nations," the television station cited him as saying. The United States has been leading international efforts to force Sudan to accept the deployment of a 20,000-strong UN peacekeeping force to halt ethnic violence in its western Darfur region. At least 200,000 people have died and some 2.5 million others have fled their homes because of the unrest which began in early 2003 when African rebels launched a revolt to gain more autonomy from the Arab-dominated Khartoum government.
The UN Security Council passed a resolution last month mandating deployment of the peacekeepers, to replace an underfunded and ineffective African Union force in Darfur, but Sudan has rejected the demand. In a previous video posted on the Internet to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Zawahiri warned that the Gulf and Israel would be the next targets of Al-Qaeda. "You should worry about your presence in two areas," he said in a message to Western powers. "The first is the Gulf, from where you will be expelled, God willing, after your defeat in Iraq, and your economic ruin will be achieved. "And the second is Israel, because the jihadi reinforcements are getting closer, with God's help and power, and your defeat there will put an end to the superiority of the Zionists and Crusaders." The Egyptian-born Zawahiri is regarded as the ideological powerhouse behind the terror group and carries a 25-million-dollar US bounty for information leading to his arrest or death.
posted by wnsworld @ 3:11 AM
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