CAIRO, Dec 14, (Agencies): Al-Qaida’s deputy leader on Monday accused President Barack Obama of deceiving the Arab world and failing to advance Middle East peace talks, and said the militants’ struggle against the United States and its allies is “a war between Muslims and infidels.”
In a new message posted on the Internet, Ayman Al-Zawahri claimed Obama has brought the region nothing but “blockade and siege” despite efforts to reach out to Arabs.
“Obama’s plan, though wrapped in smiles and calls for respect and understanding, aims only to support Israel,” al-Zawahri said in a 26-minute audio message.
Osama bin Laden’s deputy has been critical of Obama since his election, even releasing a message that referred to the US president as a “house negro,” a slur for a black subservient to whites.
“Obama’s policy is nothing but another cycle in the Crusader and Zionist campaign to enslave and humiliate us, and to occupy our land and steal our wealth,” al-Zawahri said.
The authenticity of the statement could not be independently verified, but it was posted on a Web site commonly used for militant messaging.


In it, al-Zawahri also scoffed at key American allies in the region — the Egyptian president and the Jordanian and the Saudi kings — for supporting peace with Israel.
He urged Muslims and Palestinians to wage holy war, or jihad, not only in Israel and the Palestinian territories but also beyond those areas, saying there are “ample opportunities elsewhere.”
He praised Muslim militants fighting in Pakistan, saying the conflict there was a “war of Muslim dignity and pride” and warned the Palestinians against any negotiations with Israel.
“We should continue jihad to liberate Palestinian land and establish an Islamic state there. We should wage jihad against Jews and all those who support them, whether they are Americans or Westerners,” he said.
The terror network’s No. 2 said the group “will not forget” its members held in American prisons.
He specifically mentioned Ramzi Youssef, convicted and now serving a life sentence for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, and also Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaida’s mastermind of the September 11 bombings.
Mohammed and four others, held for years at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, are due to stand trial on charges they plotted the September 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.


Bin Laden
The United States may be expanding its war against Al-Qaeda, but experts warn that prize target Osama bin Laden has become a symbolic icon whose liquidation alone would not destroy the terror network.
The Saudi-born mastermind, now in his 50s and rumoured to be in poor health, is the world’s most-wanted man with 25 million dollars on his head. But intelligence on his whereabouts is vague and contradictory.
The received wisdom is that he is out of reach in mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which Washington says is Al-Qaeda’s chief sanctuary, thick with Taliban and tribesmen fiercely hostile to outsiders.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing a surge in NATO and US troops in Afghanistan, warns that taking bin Laden out would not spell the final demise of Al-Qaeda.
“I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens Al-Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world,” McChrystal said last week.
“It would not defeat Al-Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don’t think that we can finally defeat Al-Qaeda until he’s captured or killed.”


Many experts believe bin Laden is now little more than a guiding light for extreme Islamist cells operating across the globe.
“Ayman al-Zawahiri is more the target today — the real number one of the network, the most active and most radical,” one Western counter-terrorism official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Pakistani authorities say a CIA missile just missed Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s Egyptian ideologue, in January 2006 in Bajaur, in the semi-autonomous tribal belt near the Afghan border. Since then, he has disappeared.
Writing in The New York Times, anthropologist Scott Atran said bin Laden and company had not directly commanded a successful attack in the United States or Europe since Sept 11, 2001.
“The American invasion of Afghanistan devastated Al-Qaeda’s core of top personnel and its training camps,” he wrote.
“The real threat is home-grown youths who gain inspiration from Osama bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.”
Under President Barack Obama, the United States has stepped up drone attacks against Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects in the tribal belt.


National Security Advisor James Jones believes bin Laden is somewhere around the Pakistani region of North Waziristan, “sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border”.
The border features some of the most inaccessible terrain in the world, with its towering mountains, plunging valleys, narrow ravines and network of caves.
“It’s a real black hole, where Western and Pakistani intelligence services have no presence at all,” said the Western official.
“His safety lies in a mix of adoration, ignorance in a tribal population cut off from the outside world, and absolute terror, likely in an impenetrable area totally in Al-Qaeda’s hands.
“There are valleys so narrow, especially in Waziristan, that drone attacks are impossible because they can’t fire vertically,” the official added.
A senior Pakistani counter-terrorism official said the tribal belt was “well known to (bin Laden) and his followers”.
“It is out of bounds for intelligence agents to penetrate,” he told AFP on condition of anonymity.