NEW YORK – As the White House continued to debate Friday about how to prove Osama bin Laden was dead, the terror group al-Qaeda released its own extensive statement confirming the demise of their leader.
The message, posted online, pledges that followers of the extremist Islamic ideology will “continue on the path of jihad” – or holy war – against the United States and its allies. But it also offers a hint of self-doubt by saying it will prevail in its battle with the West or “die trying.”
“The blood of the mujahid Sheikh Osama bin Laden, may God have mercy upon him, weighs more to us and is more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain,” says the message as translated by the Washington-based monitoring group SITE.
“It will remain, with God’s permission, a curse that chases the Americans and their agents, and goes after them inside and outside their countries.”
In another twist, the message also partially plays down the significance of bin Laden, saying he “was not a prophet” but “just a Muslim man.”
While this may have been in part a bid to diminish the U.S. success in killing him, it also opened the way for al-Qaeda to argue that just as God “elevated” bin Laden, so too will other Muslims emerge to “disturb the lives of their enemies.”
The statement came as U.S. President Barack Obama held private meetings with unidentified members of the elite commando team that took part in the raid that killed bin Laden.
Obama flew into an army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and immediately went into behind-closed-doors encounters with service members the White House would only term as “special operators.”
“While at Fort Campbell, President Obama and Vice President Biden will have the opportunity to hear from and thank some of the special operators involved in the operation,” a White House official said.
The meeting comes at at time where the White House faces continuing pressure to release more information on bin Laden’s death. The White House weighed Friday whether to release new information on how officials identified the corpse of bin Laden after Navy SEALs shot him in his hideaway compound in Pakistan early Monday, Pakistan time.
But al-Qaeda’s admission to its followers that bin Laden is dead would appear to lay to rest – in extremist circles – that he is indeed gone.
The statement, which al-Qaeda posted Thursday on jihadist websites, appears to have been written shortly after U.S. President Barack Obama announced bin Laden’s death early Monday, since it warns the United States against mistreating their leader’s body.
U.S. officials announced Monday that the United States had weighted and then released the body into the Arabian Sea following a Muslim funeral ritual aboard a U.S. ship.
Al-Qaeda pledged it would survive the loss of their leader because “Sheik Osama did not build an organization that would die with his death.”
It also said that it would soon release a videotape bin Laden had made before his death, and presumably in anticipation of it.
One of bin Laden’s wives, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told Pakistani interrogators that the al-Qaeda leader had lived in the compound – located not far from a key Pakistani army base in the “garrison” town of Abbottabad – for five years, Reuters reported.
As the United States continued to press Pakistan to explain how its security services could not have known of bin Laden’s presence, the al-Qaeda statement calls on Pakistanis to “cleanse” their country of Americans.
While al-Qaeda has in the past cited a series of reasons for its attacks on the “infidel” West, its message confirming bin Laden’s death cites just one: the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians over governance of the West Bank and Gaza.
“America and those who live in America will never enjoy security until our people in Palestine enjoy it,” al-Qaeda says.
The statement also insists that not only the “soldiers of Islam,” but also “groups and individuals” will continue to battle the West. Such a claim reflects the influence the terror group feels it has in inciting what terror experts have called “franchise groups” and “lone wolves” already based in the United States and other Western countries.
U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday nixed the idea of releasing photographs of bin Laden’s body to prove he is dead.
The White House has already said Central Intelligence Agency operatives used facial recognition analysis to confirm the man U.S. Navy SEALs shot was, in fact, bin Laden. It is also believed that DNA samples matched those of bin Laden’s relatives with 99.9% certainty.
Postmedia News
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