Dubai: Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged all Muslims in a recently released audio recording to support Syrian rebels in overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad so that the defeat to Israel would become easier.
Zawahiri was speaking on the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. He criticised Muslim governments in the Middle East and in Asia for failing to pursue the cause of political Islam.
He criticised the new leadership in Egypt in particular for sticking to its 1979 peace treaty with Israel and Pakistan, which he described as a “government for sale and an army for rent”.
Zawahiri said the US was propping up Assad because it feared the rise of another Islamist regime to threaten its ally Israel, Reuters reported.
“Supporting jihad in Syria to establish a Muslim state is a basic step towards Jerusalem, and thus America is giving the secular Baathist regime one chance after another for fear that a government is established in Syria that would threaten Israel,” he said.
Zawahiri, who took over as al Qaeda chief after Osama bin Laden was killed last year, said “the Islamic nation” needed to focus on the goal of helping to “liberate Palestine” – a reference to Israel and the occupied territories where there are zones of Palestinian self-rule.
He singled out Egypt, saying the Muslim Brotherhood-led government was serving Israel by guarding its borders according to the terms of the Camp David peace treaty.
“I appeal to the honourable members of the Egyptian army, and there are many of them, not to be guards for the borders of Israel, and not to defend its borders or participate in besieging our people in Gaza,” he said.
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