Latest al-Qaeda tape made France a target: report
Pastor Dale Morgan
Latest al-Qaeda tape made France a target: report*
Reuters
Thursday, September 14, 2006; 4:58 AM
PARIS (Reuters) - Deputy al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged a
militant Algerian Islamist group to punish "Crusader nation" France,
even though it vehemently opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, a newspaper
said on Thursday.
The Le Figaro daily cited a security expert who had reviewed the entire
tape, released on Monday, in which Zawahiri called on the Algerian GSPC
group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders."
He also urged the GSPC -- the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat --
to sow fear "in the hearts of the traitors and the apostate sons of
France" and to crush the "pillars of the Crusader alliance."
The expression crusader refers to medieval military campaigns waged in
the name of Christendom to recapture the Holy Land from Muslims, and is
frequently used in Islamist circles to designate enemies of Islam.
When Zawahiri's message was initially released on the Internet, to
coincide with the 5th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the
United States, media reports focused on threats to attack U.S. allies in
Gulf Arab states and Israel.
But Anne Giudicelli, head of the Terrorisc (sic) security consultancy
and who reviewed the whole tape, told Le Figaro the anti-France message
had dominated the homepage of the Internet website used by the GSPC for
the past few days.
The group emerged from the Armed Islamic Group blamed for a massacre of
civilians during a bloody insurgency against Algeria's military-backed
government in the 1990s.
It is viewed as a major threat by the French security services and
sources quoted by Le Figaro said it had switched its focus to taking
part in the international jihad -- which means holy war in Arabic --
after losing influence at home.
Many French people believe their country is less of a target for
Islamist-inspired attacks because of France's stance over Iraq, but
officials say that cuts no ice with militants.
A ban of the traditional Muslim headscarf in secular state schools,
close French intelligence links with its former North African colonies
combating Islamist extremists, and its role in NATO operations in
Afghanistan against the Taliban militia, have secured France's status as
a "Crusader nation," experts say.
France is also dispatching some 2,000 troops to join a peacekeeping
force in its former protectorate Lebanon, putting it in the front line
of a mission that Zawahiri has denounced.
On Monday, Pierrre de Bousquet de Florian, head of the DST domestic
security service, said the threat of terrorist attack remained "very
high and very international."
"For our Islamist adversaries, our country is frankly in the Western
camp, the crusaders in their words, and we will be spared nothing," he
told RTL radio on Monday.