Osama bin Laden is running the terror war against the United States from a cave, a press report said on Thursday, quoting a source it said was the chief of training for the al-Qaeda network.
”Al-Qaeda is everywhere around the world and in strength,” claimed Abu Mohamed al-Ablaj in an e-mail interview published on Friday by Al-Majallah, a Saudi-owned weekly.
”Bin Laden is leading it from a cave, the same cave from where the orders went out to destroy the citadel of the Pentagon and which the Pentagon has not been able to destroy,” he said.
”Abu Abdullah [Bin Laden] enjoys full freedom of movement. He directs the fighting against the evil administration in Satan’s Black House from his cave.
”He swears to die fighting for God. Like any mujahedeen, he cannot imagine dying in his bed,” added al-Ablaj, a nom de guerre.
The world’s most wanted man popped up on the Qatari television station al-Jazeera on the eve of the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the US.
In a video believed to have been recorded last April or May, Bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, both looking aged and thin, were shown walking through a rocky valley, probably in Afghanistan, carrying Kalashnikov rifles.
”When Abu Abdullah disappears the whole world wonders about it, when he reappears the world is stunned,” al-Ablaj told the newspaper, which has run several previous interviews with the same man.
”His sudden reappearances are a war in themselves, it’s a blow struck at the head of the American media cobra.”
Al-Ablaj warned that ”all those who are hand in hand with America in its war against Islam are targets”, adding that al-Qaeda had people or ”a hidden hand” in the United States.
”The great strike promised” against the US was ”inevitable”.
”All those who trade with America and Israel are targets. The American economy is targeted everywhere in the world. Its leaders, ambassadors, every American and every Jew is a target.”
The terror network has been blamed for a series of bloody atacks around the world since September 11 2001.
Al-Qaeda ”is now cooperating” with Afghan warlord and ex-prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a sworn enemy of US-backed President Hamid Karzai, he said, ”and with former Afghan leaders who have repented.”
The May 12 suicide attacks on expatriate housing compounds in Riyadh had the support of many Saudis, al-Ablaj claimed.
”If there was freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia, millions of people would have come out on to the streets to celebrate.” — Sapa-AFP