Deputy al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged a militant
Algerian Islamist group to punish "Crusader nation" France, even
though it vehemently opposed the US-led war in Iraq, a newspaper
said Thursday.
The Le Figaro daily cited a security expert who had
reviewed the entire tape, released on Monday, in which Zawahiri
called on the Algerian GSPC group to become "a bone in the throat
of the American and French crusaders."
He also urged the GSPC the Salafist Group for Preaching and
Combat to sow fear "in the hearts of the traitors and the apostate
sons of France" and to crush the "pillars of the Crusader
alliance."
The expression crusader refers to medieval military campaigns
waged in the name of Christendom to recapture the Holy Land from
Muslims, and is frequently used in Islamist circles to designate
enemies of Islam.
When Zawahiri's message was initially released on the Internet,
to coincide with the 5th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on
the United States, media reports focused on threats to attack US
allies in Gulf Arab states and Israel.
But Anne Giudicelli, head of the Terrorisc (sic) security
consultancy and who reviewed the whole tape, told Le
Figaro the anti-France message had dominated the homepage of
the Internet website used by the GSPC for the past few days. The
group emerged from the Armed Islamic Group blamed for a massacre of
civilians during a bloody insurgency against Algeria's
military-backed government in the 1990s.
It is viewed as a major threat by the French security services
and sources quoted by Le Figaro said it had switched its
focus to taking part in the international jihad which means holy
war in Arabic after losing influence at home.
A ban of the traditional Muslim headscarf in secular state
schools, close French intelligence links with its former North
African colonies combating Islamist extremists, its role in NATO
operations in Afghanistan against the Taliban militia, and its
planned dispatch of 2,000 troops to Lebanon have secured France's
status as a "Crusader nation," experts say.
(China Daily September 15, 2006)
