DUBAI, 26 March 2004 — Arabic television Al-Jazeera last night aired a purported new tape by Al-Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri in which he called on Pakistanis to overthrow President Pervez Musharraf’s government.
“I call on Muslims in Pakistan to get rid of their government which is working for Americans,” said the voice on the tape, which sounded like previous recordings for Al-Zawahiri.
“Musharraf wants to stab the holy struggle in Afghanistan in the back. The Pakistani people had offered a helping hand to their brothers in Afghanistan, that’s why Americans delegated Musharraf to take revenge on the tribes along the border, especially the Pashtun.”
Pakistan has been waging a campaign over the last fortnight to root out Al-Qaeda elements on its border with Afghanistan in tandem with a US sweep on the other side of the frontier.
Pakistani officials said last week fierce resistance suggested militants were protecting a “high-value target”, perhaps Al-Zawahiri — but the military later said that was unfounded “guesswork”.
Musharraf narrowly escaped two assassination attempts in December blamed on Muslim militants.
He faced strong opposition demands yesterday to stop the offensive by some 5,000 troops in the lawless South Waziristan tribal region, but officials said it would go on until all militants were eliminated.
Scores of people have been killed. Pashtun tribes inhabit both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.
“The CIA is reviewing the tape in an effort to determine whether it is authentic,” a US intelligence official told reporters in Washington.
The CIA has determined that two tapes broadcast on Arab television in February were “probably Al-Zawahiri” — who it believes played a key role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In those tapes, he accused France of “crusader hatred” toward Islam by banning head scarves from state classrooms and threatened more attacks against the United States.
On the new tape, the speaker said: “Pakistan is targeted mainly because Americans don’t want it to be a nuclear power in Asia because it is Muslim.”
The speaker said Musharraf had plans, including “strangling the jihad in Kashmir” — the majority Muslim state disputed between India and Pakistan — by gradually abandoning the right of Kashmiri independence and paralyzing Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.
