Al-Zarqawi said Shiites most dangerous
(AP)Updated: 2006-12-09 16:20
The slain terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi purportedly believed that Iraq's Shiite Muslims were more dangerous than U.S. forces and more evil than dictator Saddam Hussein, according to a posthumous interview published Friday on the Internet.
 This is an undated file photo released in Amman, Jordan, Dec. 14, 2002, of Jordanian-born terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The late leader of al-Qaida in Iraq purportedly saw the country's Shiite Muslims as more dangerous than U.S. forces and more evil than dictator Saddam Hussein, according to a posthumous interview published on the Internet Friday, Dec. 8, 2006. The 33-page interview, carried out some time before a U.S. fighter bomber killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June, could not be authenticated but it was posted on a Web site known to be a clearing-house for al-Qaida material. [AP]  |
The posting, which comes amid ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq, said the interview had been kept in al-Qaida's archive but did not explain why the terror group had decided to release it six months after his death.
In the interview, al-Zarqawi is quoted as saying the leader of Iraq's Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is a "satan" who publicly tells Shiites to stay above the violence but secretly tells them to attack.
"Al-Sistani has ordered his followers not to fight the Americans ... and yet they hit Sunnis with assassinations, forcing them to flee their homes and attacking their mosques," said al-Zarqawi, a Sunni from Jordan. "For us, the Shiites are far more dangerous than the Americans."
"The mass graves that Saddam perpetrated, and all his other crimes over the past decades, do not amount to one-tenth of what the Shiites have done in the last three years," al-Zarqawi is quoted as saying.
Earlier this week, a bipartisan commission in the United States warned "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating" and recommended fundamentally different U.S. policies to combat the sectarian violence roiling the country.
The Iraq Study Group report also concluded that al-Qaida in Iraq is now largely made up of Sunni Arabs. Some 1,300 foreign fighters are believed to support the group or be available to carry out suicide bombings, the study found.
In the interview, Al-Zarqawi condemns the attacks of Iraq's Shiite Muslim militiamen on the country's Sunni Muslim community. Yet it was al-Zarqawi who had fomented Shiite-Sunni strife as the best way to scuttle the U.S. plans to rebuild Iraq as a democratic state after Saddam's overthrow.
Al-Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalayleh, was responsible for the most vicious of the wave of attacks that occurred in the first years of the Iraqi insurgency. He is believed to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages. The U.S. had put a $25 million bounty on his head, the same amount as for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
In the interview, al-Zarqawi also rails against the leader of the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, implicitly accusing Sheik Hassan Nasrallah of being in league with Israel.
Al-Zarqawi accuses Nasrallah of being two-faced in his opposition to Israel and suggests it is not an accident that Israeli aircraft have not killed him as they have killed several leaders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
"Hassan Nasrallah sits for hours at a military parade and Israeli aircraft don't bomb him. Who is he kidding?" al-Zarqawi is quoted as saying.
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