WASHINGTON (AFP) — Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri said that building Iraq as a "fortress of Islam" is the "most important duty" for Muslims, in an audio message released Thursday according to the SITE monitoring service.
In a nearly 16 minute audio file posted on jihadist Internet forums marking the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Zawahiri, known as Al-Qaeda's ideological thinker, called on Muslims to fight for creating a greater Muslim state.
"We will only get our rights back with our own hands and not through beggary or fraudulent elections," he said, according to SITE's summary.
Zawahiri's talk, titled "Five years after the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by the Tyrants," contains references to US Iraqi commander General David Petraeus's April 8 testimony to the US Congress, and to a textile worker strike in Egypt on April 6 as evidence that it was a recent recording, according to SITE.
The monitoring service said he called on Muslims to make Iraq a "fortress of Islam" and, underscoring the Sunni Muslim orientation of Al-Qaeda, he referred to a plot against Iraq by the United States together with Shiite Iran, which he said would lead to the Mideast region exploding.
He also discussed the situation in Egypt, saying that Muslims there are deprived of wealth and basic necessities, according to SITE.
It was Zawahiri's second audio file released this month. In the first, posted April 2, he launched a blistering attack on the United Nations.
"The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimized the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands," Zawahiri said in that recorded talk.
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