Al-Qaeda released a videotape on Thursday purporting to show some of the September 11 hijackers training in Afghanistan and meeting Osama bin Laden shortly before the 2001 attacks on the US.
The tape, which was broadcast by the Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera, showed masked men practising martial arts and concealing knives. A procession of men, whose faces could not be clearly seen, also appeared descending a steep mountain path to a rocky gully, where they are greeted by Bin Laden, smiling in a white headdress and dark robe.
The video was produced by as-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s media arm, and appeared to have been issued to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It included the video ”wills” of two of the 19 hijackers, Hamza al-Ghamdi and Wail al-Shehri, in which they justified their actions as reprisals against supposed ill-treatment of Muslims by the West. ”If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use,” Ghamdi said.
The video also showed Muhammad Atef, the group’s commander until he was killed by a US air strike in Afghanistan in 2001; and Ramzi Binal-shibh, allegedly one of the September 11 planners who was captured in Pakistan four years ago and is one of the captives US President George Bush said would be transferred to Guantánamo Bay from secret prisons abroad.
Peter Bergen, author of books on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda said that before his arrest, Binal-shibh had told a journalist that he travelled to Afghanistan from Hamburg in late August 2001 to ensure that Bin Laden knew about the timing of the attacks five days before they happened
”I can’t prove it but I’m sure that this tape was made then. Al-Qaeda would want to record the moment when Osama bin Laden got the news the attacks were imminent and Ramzi Binalshibh lived in Germany in the period before 9/11 and so his appearance in Afghanistan on this tape would be very unusual,” Bergen wrote in an e-mail from Afghanistan.
But the video did not include any recent footage of Bin Laden, who has not been seen on video since 2004, although he has produced audio messages this year.
”It’s strange that there is no contemporaneous Bin Laden tape or video. Maybe there’s one in the pipeline now that we will see shortly. Certainly they would want to mark the anniversary, as they have in the past, with statements or interviews,” Bergen said.
The Royal Institute of International Affairs issued a report on Thursday arguing that although al-Qaeda remained a powerful group its support was waning. The US-led response to the 2001 attacks had enhanced its reputation among radical Muslims but ”seriously undermined” its ability to recruit, organise or raise funds, the report, titled Al-Qaeda, Five Years On, said. It also argued that the group’s attacks in Saudi Arabia and Jordan had killed Muslims and had therefore alienated many in the Islamic world.
The report said al-Qaeda was being eclipsed in some parts of the Arab world by non-violent Islamic groups. It had also been outshone in the eyes of Arab militants by the recent military exploits of the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah.
On Thursday, al-Jazeera also broadcast the first video statement by Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, leader of subsidiary group al-Qaeda in Iraq. Muhajer, who took over the leadership of the group after the death in June of its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said: ”Our enemy has unified its ranks against us. Isn’t it time to get together, worshippers of God?” – Guardian Unlimited Â