WASHINGTON, 8 October 2005 — An intercepted letter from Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 to the top Islamic militant in Iraq reveals concern over the impact on Arab opinion of beheadings and videotaped executions, a Pentagon spokesman said yesterday. The letter from Ayman Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s second in command, also complained about communications, unity of command and funding problems to the extent that he asked Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, for money, he said.
Bryan Whitman, the spokesman, said the letter lays out in a blunt and straightforward manner Al-Qaeda’s broader strategy of driving US forces from Iraq, establishing an Islamic state across the Muslim world and ultimately destroying Israel. “What this letter demonstrates is that they also know the importance of Iraq,” he said. “They understand how important Iraq is to their effort as being central to their efforts right now, to their strategy and to their long-term plans.” The 6,000-word letter was dated in July and intercepted sometime after that, apparently by the US military.
It was unclear whether it was intercepted electronically or captured in a raid, or whether it ever made it to Zarqawi. “It’s believed to be authentic,” Whitman said. The government has not released a copy of the letter, and officials declined to quote it verbatim because of the difficulty of translating the Arabic into English.
Its existence was disclosed to certain US news organizations on Thursday after President George W. Bush gave a major speech aimed at shoring up eroding US support for war against Al-Qaeda. After the president’s speech, local authorities in New York announced that they had received specific intelligence about a threat to the city’s subway system based on intelligence gathered overseas.
As described by US officials, the Zarqawi letter buttresses the president’s view that the United States faces a long war against a determined enemy and that Iraq is now at the center of that struggle.
Whitman said the letter demonstrates that the extremists “have the overall goal of the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, establishment of an Islamic state centered on Iraq and its neighboring nations and eventually focused on Israel.”
“It also demonstrates that among the terrorist leaders there are differences of opinion concerning the terrorist tactics, but it also shows unity in terms of their overall objectives,” he said. Zawahiri “says they should avoid tactics such as bombing mosques (and) slaughtering hostages in order to not alienate the masses,” he said.
The letter also noted that the majority of the battle in Iraq was conducted through the media and that Zawahiri should conduct his actions outside the view of the Western media.
