DERA ISMAIL KHAN: Pakistan’s Taliban movement, regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous militant groups, said on Thursday it backed Ayman al-Zawahri as al Qaeda’s new leader and vowed to carry out attacks against Western targets.

A militant website said Zawahri has taken command of al Qaeda, after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a secret US raid in Pakistan last month.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan described Zawahri as an “capable person” and said the former Egyptian doctor would inspire the group to take on the West.

“We have been carrying out our activities which, inshallah (God willing), will gather more momentum. We will get revenge for the oppression by the West,” he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The Pakistani Taliban, which has close links with al Qaeda and other anti-Western militant organisations, has been blamed for many of the suicide bombings across Pakistan, a US ally seen as critical to American efforts to stabilise Afghanistan.

It has bigger ambitions but has not proven capable of carrying out sophisticated attacks in the West. It claimed responsibility for a botched bombing in New York’s Times Square.

Last year, the United States added the Tehrik-i-Taliban (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) to its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

US prosecutors charged TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud over a plot that killed seven CIA employees at a US base in Afghanistan in 2009.

Zawahri’s relationship with groups like the TTP could determine whether the man regarded as the operational brains behind al Qaeda can strengthen an organisation that has lost steam since the Sept. 11 attacks a decade ago.

Omar Khalid Khorasani, a senior Pakistani Taliban commander, recently said in response to questions posed by Reuters that Zawahri was the group’s “chief and supreme leader”.

Zawahri has expressed contempt for the US-backed Pakistani government. In recordings posted on the Internet he has urged Pakistanis to revolt against their government and army. Like other militants, he sees Pakistan as a US puppet.

In an audio recording, released in September last year, he accused the Pakistani government of responding too slowly to floods that devastated the country.

“The primary concern of the ruling class in the government and army of Pakistan is filling their domestic and foreign bank accounts with dollars, and as far as they are concerned, Pakistan and its people can go to hell,” he said.

Zawahri has tried to settle scores with the Egyptian government on Pakistani soil. He was seen as the mastermind of the suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995 that killed 16 people.

Al-Qaeda has named Ayman al-Zawahiri as its new chief following the killing of Osama bin Laden, the group has said in a statement issued in the name of the group's general command.

"The general command of al-Qaeda announces, after consultations, the appointment of Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri as head of the group," the statement, posted online on Thursday, said.

US special forces killed bin Laden in a raid on the Pakistani city of Abbottabad on May 2.

Al-Qaeda under the new leadership of al-Zawahiri will pursue its fight against the US and Israel, the group said in the statement.

"We seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite our nation to fight ... by carrying out jihad against the apostate invaders ... with their head being crusader America and its servant Israel, and whoever supports them," it said.

Al-Zawahiri has been al-Qaeda's number two for years.

$25m bounty

His whereabouts are unknown but he is widely believed to be hiding along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States is offering a $25m reward for any information leading to his capture or conviction.

"Only a few weeks ago when the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was here in Pakistan she reportedly gave Pakistan what's been described as a hitlist", Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from Islamabad, said.

"It listed five names and Zawahiri's name was on the list. Whether that means the new al-Qaeda leader is here we don't know for sure, but it certainly raises some questions".

Believed to be in his late 50s, al-Zawahiri met bin Laden in the mid-1980s when both were in Pakistan to support fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Al-Zawahiri, who was born in Egypt, vowed earlier this month to press ahead with al-Qaeda's campaign against the US and its allies, in what appeared to be his first public response to bin Laden's death.

"The Sheikh [bin Laden] has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr, and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice," he said in a video message posted online.

"Today, and thanks be to God, America is not facing an individual or a group ... but a rebelling nation which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance challenging it wherever it is."

In Thursday's statement, al-Qaeda voiced its "support [to] the uprisings of our oppressed Muslim people against the corrupt and tyrant leaders who have made our nation suffer in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya Yemen, Syria and Morocco."

The group urged those involved in the uprisings to continue their "struggle until the fall of all corrupt regimes that the West has forced onto our countries."

But Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Cairo where a popular uprising toppled longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February, said the so-called "Arab Spring" has undermined al-Qaeda in many Arab countries.

"This has been a significant blow to the ideology of al-Qaeda", he said. "Many believe al-Qaeda has lost a great deal of momentum and support across the Arab world because these revolutions were able to deliver change without the use of violence."


source:
Al-Zawahiri named new al-Qaeda chief - Central & South Asia - Al Jazeera English

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