Al-Qaeda no.2 calls on Sudanese president ‘to repent’
March 24, 2009 (WASHINGTON) — Al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman Al-Zwahiri issued a statement reacting to the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir.
“It expelled the mujahedeen, who had taken refuge in the Sudan, foremost among them Sheik Osama bin Laden” he said and contrasted Sudan’s behavior back then with Afghanistan’s after 9/11, when the Taliban ruling movement refused to turn over bin Laden despite U.S. demands.
“So will the Bashir regime take the path of Islam and jihad and abandon the political maneuvers, diplomatic ruses and international smooth-talking, which has not and will not bring anything other than disasters and tragedies?” Zwahiri said in the message, according to the US-based SITE Intelligence Group.
He also called on the Sudanese people to prepare themselves for an Iraqi style guerilla war against Westerners.
“Make preparations by training, equipping, storing and organizing for a long guerrilla war, because the modern-day Crusade (Westerners) has bared its fangs at you” Al-Zwahiri said.
The terrorist designated figure also made a rare and subtle condemnation of Khartoum with regard to the Darfur conflict.
“I am not defending Omar al-Bashir or his regime, nor am I defending what it has done in Darfur and elsewhere” he said.
However Al-Zwahiri said that the Darfur crisis is used “as an excuse for more foreign interference in the Muslim countries in the framework of the contemporary crusader-Zionist campaign”.
He also accused the ICC of double standards in its investigations saying that world leaders including former US President George W. Bush, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and senior Israeli officials deserved to be put on trial.
“Indeed, why didn’t they try (former U.S. President Harry S.) Truman, who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the first atomic bombs in history?” the militant leader asked.
Bin Laden and al-Qaida loyalists were given haven in Sudan from 1991-1996 until al-Bashir expelled them under U.S. pressure.
Sudan has warned last year that the ICC indictment of Bashir may encourage Al-Qaeda sympathizers to flock into the country and carry out attacks against Westerners.
Last year John Granville, 33, who worked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and his 40-year-old Sudanese driver Abdel Rahman Abbas were hit in their car by a hail of bullets before dawn on New Year’s Day.
The incident came a day after former US president Bush signed into a law Sudan divestment act.
The suspects put to trial are believed to be belonging to an Islamic militant group Ansar al-Tawhid which claimed responsibility for the killing.
(ST)