DUBAI, Dec 20: Al Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri vowed in a videotape aired on Wednesday that his group would pursue attacks on the United States and slammed Palestinian Hamas for joining the political process.

Only jihad can liberate occupied Palestinian territory, not elections, Zawahiri said in the video broadcast on Qatar-based pan-Arab television Al-Jazeera without explicitly naming the Islamist movement.

Zawahiri said Al Qaeda, which claimed the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, would not stop attacks on US soil as long as the United States strikes Muslims on their own land.

“If we are hit in our countries, we will not stop striking you in your country,” he said.

Zawahiri said he believed the United States would ultimately have to talk with “the real forces” in the Islamic world in order to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, in a reference to Islamist extremists.

“It seems you will undertake a painful journey of failed negotiations before being forced to go back, God willing, to negotiation with the real forces,” said a turbaned Zawahiri.

Osama bin Laden’s number two also said US President George W. Bush was deceiving Americans by telling them he was going after “terrorists” in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to keep them away from the United States.

“Your safety lies in the following equation: you will not dream of security until we live secure in Palestine and all Muslim lands,” Zawahiri said.

“It does not lie in the erroneous equation with which Bush deceives you when he says, ‘We strike the terrorists in their countries so that they will not strike in our country’,” he added.

“As our emir Sheikh Osama bin Laden, God keep him, said, ‘Like you bomb, you will be bombed, and like you kill, you will be killed’,” he added.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Zawahiri said that “any road other than jihad will only lead to loss.

“Those trying to liberate the land of Islam through elections based on secular constitutions or on decisions to surrender Palestine to the Jews will not liberate a grain of sand of Palestine.” On the contrary, “their attempts will lead to choking jihad and besieging the mujahidieen,” he said.

The Egyptian-born Zawahiri is regarded as the ideological powerhouse behind Al Qaeda and carries a 25-million-dollar US bounty for information leading to his arrest or death.

—AFP