Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden described US President Barack Obama as “powerless” to stop the war in Afghanistan and threatened to step up guerrilla warfare there in a new audiotape released to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the US.
In the 11-minute tape, addressed to the American people, bin Laden said Obama was following the warlike policies of his predecessor George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney and he urged Americans to “liberate” themselves from the influence of “neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”
The tape was posted on Islamic militant Web sites two days after the eighth anniversary of the 2001 attacks. Bin Laden usually addresses Americans in a message timed around the date of the attacks.
Bin Laden said Americans had failed to understand that al-Qaeda carried out the attacks in retaliation for US support for Israel.
If the US reconsiders its alliance with the Jewish state, al-Qaeda will respond on “sound and just bases.”
The Saudi construction magnate’s son-turned “holy warrior” and his deputies have frequently sought to wrap al-Qaeda in the Palestinian cause, seeking to draw support in the Arab world, where the issue is one of the public’s top concerns.
Al-Qaeda has also sought to depict Obama as no different from Bush, who was widely despised in the Arab world for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and his close support of Israel. Obama has won greater popularity in the region, giving a landmark speech in Cairo in June, moving to withdraw US troops from Iraq and taking a somewhat harder stance on Israel in the peace process.
“If you end the war [in Afghanistan], so let it be,” bin Laden said. “But if it is otherwise, all we will do is continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes.”
“You are waging a hopeless and losing war for the benefit of others, a war the end of which is not visible on the horizon,” he said, according to a translation of the tape posted yesterday by SITE Intelligence Group, a terrorist-monitoring firm, and by The Associated Press.
When Obama retained Defense Secretary Robert Gates of the the Bush administration, “reasonable people knew that Obama is a powerless man who will not be able to end the war as he promised,” bin Laden said.
Bin Laden devoted much of his address to discussing US connections with Israel and castigated Americans for failing to understand that the issue was behind al-Qaeda’s animosity.
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