'Al-Qaeda doesn't kill innocents'

2008-04-03 10:43

Cairo - Al-Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri has responded to criticism about the organisation's notoriously brutal tactics, maintaining that it does not kill innocents, in hour-and-a half-long audio response to questions submitted to the movement on extremist websites.

Zawahri also addressed the issue of al-Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, assuring supporters that the reclusive leader was in good health.

"Sheik Osama bin Laden is healthy and well, by the grace of Allah," he said, while noting he would not be there forever. "He must die one day, whereas Allah's religion will remain."

The audio message, which was accompanied on Wednesday by a 46-page English transcript, was the first instalment of answers to a raft of online questions and focused mainly on future al-Qaeda efforts elsewhere in the region, particularly Egypt.

Human shields

"We haven't killed the innocents, not in Baghdad nor in Morocco, nor in Algeria, nor anywhere else," he said according to the English transcript which, like the audio message, appeared on websites linked to the group.

The answer was in response to the question "excuse me, Mr Zawahri, but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency's blessing the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?"

Al-Qaeda has taken credit for the destruction of the World Trade Centre which killed nearly 3 000 people in New York City in 2001, while its affiliates in Iraq, Afghanistan and Algeria regularly set off explosives in crowded urban areas that have taken thousands of lives.

"If there is any innocent who was killed in the Mujahideen's operations, then it was either an unintentional error or out of necessity," Zawahri added.

He went on to say that it was their opponents who killed innocents and also noted that "the enemy intentionally takes up positions in the midst of the Muslims for them to be human shields for him."

Global jihad on track

Zawahri reassured many of the questioners, who seemed worried about the direction of the organisation, that the global jihad was on track and would soon expand elsewhere.

"I expect the Jihadi influence to spread after the Americans' exit from Iraq, and to move towards Jerusalem," he said to those asking when attacks on Israel would take place.

He also predicted the end of the Saudi state, which is "swimming against the tide of history" and the government of his native Egypt, which he called a "corrupt, rotten regime (that) cannot possibly continue".

Many of the questions he chose to answer focused on restarting the jihad in Egypt, which Zawahri himself helped begin and was crushed by the government in the 1990s.

"The days will reveal to you what you didn't know, and news will come to you from those who didn't have it," he said quoting an old Arabic proverb, about when the jihad would begin again in Egypt, and counselled patience.

- AP