November 11, 2001	Sunday	Shaba’an 24, 1422

DUBAI, Nov 10: Ayman Zawahri, a top lieutenant in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, said in a statement aired on Saturday that jihad would not stop until all “American Jewish” troops had been expelled from Muslim states.

Speaking in defiant language with an AK-47 rifle by his side, Zawahri rebutted in the televised statement the United States claim it had broken Qaeda and the Taliban. He said its raids on Afghanistan were only killing innocent Afghans.

“The Palestinian cause, or more precisely the Israeli-American crime in Palestine, will remain the axis of the main struggle in the heart of the Islamic world and the main motive for Muslims’ jihad against America,” Zawahri said.

“We assure it (America) that we will continue our Jihad, God willing, until we free our holy places from American Jewish aggression and until the last American Jewish soldier leaves Palestine, the Arabian Peninsula and the rest of the Muslim countries,” he said in the videotaped address broadcast by the Arabic-language al-Jazeera satellite channel.

Zawahri, an Egyptian who also heads the Islamic group Jihad which is vehemently opposed to Israel, said he was responding to a recent speech by US President George W. Bush.

“Bush, while lying to his people defending this campaign, claims that he demolished the Qaeda organisation and divided the ranks of the Taliban, but the whole world ridicules these lies.”

US officials have said the Taliban are no longer functioning as a proper government, but have also said al Qaeda remains a threat.

Zawahri said the US attacks had instead killed 1,600 civilians and made millions homeless, adding that the United States had yet to offer any evidence to justify its actions.

The United States has said it is only targeting military sites and is trying to minimise civilian casualties. The Taliban say there has been a heavy civilian death toll.

WORLD WILL LEARN THE TRUTH: “Let America gather together what forces it can, and let it lie as it wants to lie. The whole world will know after the coming strikes, who is lying and who is telling the truth,” he said, in an apparent reference to the US attacks.

Osama recently made a fiery appeal to fellow Muslims to join the holy war against the United States.

Zawahri’s appeal again appeared aimed at popular anger among many Arabs and other Muslims towards a perceived US bias in favour of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians.

“The official American ignorance in the speech of Bush and the statement of the foreign ministry about the Palestinian tragedy cannot wipe from the minds of Muslims the images of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian wounded, killed and crippled, and millions of fleeing people,” Zawahri said.—Reuters