At least not adversely.and they gain a martyr.

B

 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gNnp_6uucIXYlIPIRm8w95Z0d
YTQ?docId=CNG.ff8151f843080218558f596b5569b74a.581

 

Bin Laden death will not affect al-Qaeda: Jihad leader

By Samer al-Atrush (AFP) - May 3, 2011

CAIRO - A founding member of Egypt's Islamic Jihad and friend of Al-Qaeda's
new chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri told AFP Tuesday that Osama bin Laden's death
will not affect the organisation and pleaded against revenge attacks.

Aboud al-Zumur, who was in jail with Zawahiri after the assassination of
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, said bin Laden was a "martyr" whose
death at the hands of US special forces in Pakistan "will solve nothing."

"Al-Qaeda is not a person, it is an institution," said Zumur, who was freed
from prison after a popular revolt ousted president Hosni Mubarak in
February.

"Solving the problem entails withdrawing from occupied territories and a
balance in US policy towards Palestine."

Speaking in Cairo, Zumur pleaded with bin Laden's sympathisers not to take
revenge for the jihadist leader's assassination.

"I say to them, be patient. Don't seek revenge. If you attack tourists or
embassies, you will be attacking innocents." The US State Department issued
a warning to its citizens abroad after bin Laden's death.

Zumur said the mass protests that toppled the regimes in both Tunisia and
Egypt had sapped support for militant groups because they showed there was
another way to confront tyrants.

"They have created a new mechanism to hold regimes accountable," he said.
"This has lessened the support and importance of armed struggle."

Zumur referred to attacks by his group as "counterviolence, in response to
regime violence. After the revolution, these matters have been settled, so
there is no need for violence."

He said the Islamic Jihad and another former militant group, Al-Gamaa
al-Islamiya, were forming political parties to compete in a parliamentary
election in September.

Zumur said that Zawahiri, the 59-year-old surgeon and former Islamic Jihad
member who has long been considered the real mastermind in Al-Qaeda's war
against the United States and Arab regimes, is a "dear friend."

Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda number two, is now set to succeed bin Laden as the
world's most wanted man.

Like his Saudi-born co-conspirator, Zawahiri has been hiding ever since the
United States declared its war on terror after the September 11, 2001
attacks.

In Jordan, a former bin Laden comrade, Huthaifa Azzam, believes that
Al-Qaeda will become more extremist if Zawahiri takes over as head of the
network.

"The Americans have killed Osama bin Laden, giving a perfect excuse to
Zawahiri, who is more extremist, to carry out revenge acts," Huthaifa, 41,
son of Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of bin Laden, told AFP in an interview.

"Bin Laden stopped controlling Al-Qaeda years ago, and the organisation fell
into the iron fist of Egyptian Zawahiri. Bin Laden's son, Omar, told me that
before he decided to return to his country Saudi Arabia."

"I expect more Al-Qaeda operations against the West as well as Pakistan,
which, the group believes, killed bin Laden," he said.

But Huthaifa said attacks by Al-Qaeda on Arab countries were unlikely.

"The group has lost a lot of Arab popular support because of such
operations."

Zumur, who says he was imprisoned with Zawahiri for three years, was one of
the last Islamic Jihad members released from prison after the military took
power following Mubarak's resignation.

Zawahiri's brother Mohammed, who has been sentenced to death, was released
in March, only to be re-arrested just days later. The military gave no
explanation as to why he was set free and then jailed again.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the United State's most wanted man, was jailed for
three years in Egypt for militancy and was implicated in Sadat's
assassination and a 1997 massacre of tourists in Luxor.

Facing a death sentence, he left Egypt in the mid-1980s initially for Saudi
Arabia, but soon headed for Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar where
the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was based, and then
to Afghanistan, where he joined forces with bin Laden.

 



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