“The Zawahiri’s double edge strategy”

With the occasion of the 5th birthday of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq (April 2003), Al-Qaeda tries to galvanize its troops, weakened in Iraq, since Sunnites tribes formerly risen against the Americans, joined the coalition and gave up the Jihad who kills more Muslims than “Crusaders”, and which is no longer supported any more by the Iraqis. (translated by Gisela Cepparo)

The number two of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, informed, in an audio recording diffused last Thursday, that Jihad was far from being overcome in Mesopotamia. Fourth of the year, the declaration of Zawahiri (that regularly answers the Net surfers on the sites: Al-Sahab and Al-Fair), followed the one of April 2, justifying the attacks of Algiers (11 deaths) against the Algerian antenna of the ONU, " enemy of the Islam and the Muslims”, and right after the warning video of Bin Laden, at the end of March, threatening Europe as “responsible” of the caricatures of Mahomet. Trying to deny that Al-Qaeda underwent reverses, Zawahiri scoffed the combatants resulting from the anti American insurrection passed into the other camp (“the Councils of Alarm clocks”), affirming that “very soon Iraq will become the fortress of the Islam, from where the brigades will be launched in order to release the mosque of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem”. Taking note of the fact that Bush has freeze the retirement scheme of the GI' S, the former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, counts on the fact that in the event of victory of the democrats decided to withdraw or decrease the troops of Iraq, the Iraq’s Jihad, which was weakened only since the reinforcement of the US troops in Iraq (Surge), knows a revival. But Doctor Zawahiri is not satisfied to fustigate the “American Crusaders”. Its worst enemies are within the Muslim world, in particular on the Shiite side of Iran, which would seek “to annex the south of Iraq”. Nor in the side of the Egyptian Government, which “starves its people” by applying an " American Zionist plan”. In accordance with the ideology of the Islamic salafism which dreams to restore the abolished Caliphate by Atatürk in 1924 (Ottoman Caliphate), and fights all kind of updating and democratization of the Islamic world, Zawahiri called up the creation of a great Muslim State exceeding the national framework, “the Ouma division”. A pan-Islamic entity that will never include the Persian Shiites (enemies of the Arab Sunnites). Because Teheran its accused of willing “to annex the south of Iraq and the Arabic peninsula” (where many Shiites lives), ignoring the competitions between Washington and Teheran around the control of Iraq and the “resistance” of the Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr, Zawahiri denounces “the plot fomented against Iraq by the United States and Iran”, aiming on causing an " explosion of the region". In fact, the anti-Iranian diatribes of Al-Qaeda’s brain, which had once convinced Bin Laden to pass from the Jihad against the Soviets to that against the Muslim regimes (“treacherous”), are explained by two factors: 1/ the fight for the power in Iraq, which opposes the formerly Sunnites to the power, democratically minorities with a Shiite majority once persecuted, which are taking its revenge, like the Kurds, since the fall of Saddam. 2/ the competition on the market of the radical Islamism, opposing the jihad’s Salfists, incarnated by Al-Qaeda in the Iranian Islamic Republic of Ahmadinejad, which threatens the Sunnite leadership since the pawns of Teheran in Iraq, Palestine (Hamas) and in Lebanon (Hezbollah, the “faithful ones of south-Lebanon”), connecting the media, military and politics successes against the Sunnites. Without forgetting the demographic progression of the Shiites of the Gulf, sitting like the Kurds, on oil wells, then the conversions with the Shiism of Syria in the Maghreb. In the final analysis, the speech of Zawahiri has a double edge: he points out that the worst enemies of the Muslims are the Islamic ones, the greatest killers of Muslims, argument that already moved away from Jihad many Iraqis…