In a video broadcast by Arab satellite television, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, encouraged Muslims around the world to take part in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in south Lebanon and Gaza.
In the video, which was aired on the Arab-language network Al Jazeera on July 27, 2006, Zawahiri, wearing a gray robe and white turban, said Al Qaeda now considers “all the world as a battlefield open in front of us.”
“It is a Jihad for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq,” Zawahiri said. “We will attack everywhere.” This latest video is Zawahri’s tenth message this year.
A picture of the burning World Trade Center is located on the wall behind Zawahiri, along with photos of Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the September 11 terrorists attacks and Mohammed Atef, a former lieutenant of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden who was killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan in 2001.
Zawahiri also said that Arab regimes are complicit in Israel’s actions against Hezbollah and the Palestinians. “The shells and rockets ripping apart Muslim bodies in Gaza and Lebanon are not only Israeli (weapons), but are supplied by all the countries of the crusader coalition. Therefore, every participant in the crime will pay the price.”
In a previous video released in March, Zawahiri encouraged the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to continue fighting against Israel.
Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq claimed responsibility for a rocket attack in northern Israel in December 2005 an audio statement attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who lead Al Qaeda in Iraq before he was killed in June 2006 in an air strike northwest of Baghdad.
In the audio statement, released on militant Islamic Web sites on January 9, Zarqawi said that his group fired rockets from Lebanon “at the grandchildren of monkeys and pigs” in the Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona and that the attack was “only the start of a blessed in-depth strike against the Zionist enemy.”
Al Qaeda in Iraq previously said it was targeting “Jews and Crusaders” in November 2005 when it carried out suicide bombings at three hotels in Amman. Zarqawi’s group also claimed responsibility for firing rockets against Israeli and U.S. targets from the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba in August 2005.
Other attacks against distinctly Jewish targets by Al Qaeda include an attack on a Jewish synagogue in Tunisia on April 2002; the coordinated bombing of an Israeli-owned resort and an attempt to down an Israeli airliner in Mombassa, Kenya in November 2002; an attack on several Jewish-associated targets in Casablanca, Morocco in April 2003; the bombing of two Jewish Synagogues in Istanbul in November 2003; and an attack on several tourist resorts in Sinai, Egypt that are popular with Israelis in October 2004.
