Al-Qaeda spokesman and Bosnia veteran Abu Ghaith: Crusader-Jewish Alliance No Longer Immune

Editors Note: The complete translation of this statement and audio will be available on JUS, uncut and uncensored, later today. In the meantime, we remind our viewers that the statements, opinions and points of view expressed in this article are those of the author and shall not be deemed to mean that they are necessarily those of Jihad Unspun, the publisher, editor, writers, contributors or staff.

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a leading Al-Qaeda spokesman who has been stripped of his Kuwaiti nationality, resurfaced Sunday, December 8, threatening more attacks.

The former Kuwaiti school-teacher and mosque imam also made a fresh claim of responsibility for last month’s attacks in Kenya which killed 13 people, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. “The two Mombasa attacks are the work of Al-Qaeda,” Abu Ghaith said in a voice recording posted on the jehadonline.org website.

“The Crusader-Jewish alliance will no longer be immune from attack anywhere,” Abu Ghaith warned. “We are going to strike at its vital installations and strategic interests with all means at our disposal,” he said, calling on Al-Qaeda fighters to “prepare themselves seriously for the next phase which will be bigger and more serious.”

Three Israelis and 10 Kenyans were killed when three bombers struck a resort hotel near the port city of Mombasa on November 28, shortly after a failed missile attack on an Israeli jetliner packed with returning holidaymakers.

“We must use shock weapons against the enemy, by mounting lightning well-targeted operations against him everywhere in the world so that he feels danger, insecurity and instability on land, at sea and in the air,” the Al-Qaeda spokesman said.

The Al-Qaeda spokesman said the movement was taking the new step of formally claiming responsibility for the twin attacks because it had succeeded in regrouping in the face of the U.S.-led campaign against it that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

“The nature of our activity stopped us from claiming our jihad operations against the Crusader alliance in the previous phase, but now we find ourselves in better circumstances which allow us to do so,” said Abu Ghaith.

Al-Qaeda experts had cast doubt on an earlier claim of responsibility for the Mombasa attacks carried by jehadonline.org and another Islamic website, islammemo.com, on December 2, noting that the organization had previously limited itself to welcoming the operations of its militants.

“Al-Qaeda has never directly claimed responsibility for operations carried out by its militants, making do with hailing the attacks,” one analyst told AFP at the time, although he accepted that the new statement might presage a change of tactics by the organization.

In Sunday’s statement, the Al-Qaeda spokesman, who was stripped of his Kuwaiti nationality in 2001, singled out growing U.S. war preparations against Iraq as a particular target for the group’s operations.

“The danger of what America and its allies are preparing against Iraq and its people is not limited to overthrowing the infidel regime and its dictator but is aimed at ... Balkanizing this great country, pillaging its wealth and occupying a vital part of our Arab world,” said Abu Ghaith. He charged that the allies’ ultimate goal was to fulfill the hard-line Zionist “dream of a greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

U.S. intelligence has waged a no-holds-barred war against Islamic websites suspected of links to Al-Qaeda for fear they are being used to send out orders to the group’s operatives around the world. The one long regarded as the most reliable - drasat.com - has been shut down as have two others which, like jehadonline and islammemo, have posted statements attributed to Al-Qaeda - alneda.com and azzam.com. The result has been occasional uncertainty about the authenticity of the statements that they carry.

Two days after Al-Qaeda's earlier claim of responsibility for the Mombasa attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush said: “I believe Al-Qaeda was involved in the African bombings,” although his spokesman Ari Fleischer later clarified that he had not meant he was certain.

Since the United States launched its war on terror in Afghanistan, Abu Ghaith has made numerous televised appearances, spouting defiance against the United States and threatening terror attacks. Like Osama bin Laden, Abu Ghaith’s whereabouts remain a mystery. Last April, a senior security source told a Kuwaiti newspaper he was “alive and kicking” and “moving around in disguise” on the Iranian-Afghan borders after fleeing U.S. raids on Afghanistan.

Abu Ghaith was stripped of his Kuwaiti nationality last October because of links to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. “I don’t regret in any way losing my Kuwaiti nationality, even if they stripped 1,000 nationalities from me, I would still continue a Jihad, even if Bin Laden died,” Abu Ghaith told a Kuwaiti newspaper through a mediator at the time.

“The citizens of poor countries should seek to obtain the nationality of rich countries. But my leaving for Afghanistan was not because I was seeking a better life but because I was keen on fighting for a holy cause,” Abu Ghaith said.

Abu Ghaith was born in Kuwait in 1965 and is married with six children, one son and five daughters, his former acquaintances told AFP last year. He taught Islamic studies at the Al-Asoosi School in Rumaithiya, south of Kuwait City until June 2001. He then moved to the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs where he was employed as a mosque imam. That summer however, Abu Ghaith was fired from the ministry due to an absence of two weeks without prior permission.

During Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990-1991, Abu Ghaith was an active member of Kuwait’s Muslim Brotherhood. Throughout the seven-month occupation, he helped in the distribution of food and money to Kuwaitis and also volunteered as a preacher during Friday prayers. He continued to preach after the emirate’s liberation in February 1991, but was later suspended over his public criticism of the Kuwaiti government.

In 1992 he broke away from the Muslim Brotherhood and formed his own splinter group after apparently opposed the movement’s participation in parliament, based on his belief that Kuwait’s constitution is un-Islamic. In the summer of 1994, Abu Ghaith spent two months fighting with the Muslims in Bosnia. He frequently traveled out of Kuwait concealing his membership of Al-Qaeda.

jihadunspun.com is the enemies web site, which disgusts me that it is still up and running. We should do all we can to shut them down. I posted this under the "Know your enemy" philosophy.

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