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US warned of suicide attacks
27/04/2003 18:29 - (SA)
Islamabad - Radical Afghan guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has warned that US forces would face attacks by Arab fidayeen (suicide bombers) in Iraq where hundreds of Osama bin Laden supporters have gathered, a report said on Sunday.
"Arab fidayeen have been undergoing pain and suffering in search of Americans in foreign lands, but the enemy has now reached their own homes," he said in a statement released by the private Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).
"Now they need no visa and no passport to travel abroad. They can ambush them everywhere (in Iraq)," said the former fundamentalist guerrilla leader who is wanted in Washington for terrorism.
"They (the fidayeen) can explode bombs and embrace shahadat (martyrdom) in their own country," said the six-page statement dated April 11, after the fall of Baghdad to the US-led coalition.
"They (Americans) must now wait for hundreds of Iraqi Osamas," he said referring to the Arab dissident bin Laden who is wanted for the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
The Pakistan-based private news service said the statement of Hekmatyar, who was declared a terrorist by the United States last year, was written in his native Pashtu language, spoken by the majority of Afghans.
The signed statement was e-mailed and faxed from somewhere inside Afghanistan.
"The fall of Iraq is not a US military victory, it is the success of modern technology," he said adding that the capture of Iraq was a prelude to "subjugation" of the entire Middle East.
"The recent intensification in Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territory proves this."
Hekmatyar described the invasion of Iraq as a "moral and political defeat" of the United States. "It has triggered a hatred and enmity in the Islamic world which will be difficult to eradicate."
He claimed that Iraq would now come either under US rule or "America will impose a puppet regime like Hamid Karzai's administration in Afghanistan."
The US has so far "not succeeded in Afghanistan" despite spending millions of dollars over the past 18 months, he said, adding that "no one can guarantee that America would benefit peacefully from the Iraqi oil."
He claimed that the US had expansionist designs in the region.
Hekmatyar also slammed the United Nations, calling it a tool of big powers particularly the United States.
- AFX
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