Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (15222)	1/1/2002 12:27:10 PM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

Bin Laden deputy's 'will' published American intelligence officials have translated a 100-page document they describe as Osama bin Laden's top deputy's "last will". The volume was written by the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and bin Laden's chief strategist and smuggled out of Afghanistan in December. It tells how the terror chief said if al Qaida was facing military defeat, its key members should flee and regroup elsewhere. The document, by Ayman al-Zawahiri, was first published in part in London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, which the Washington Post said had been passed to it by one of al-Zawahiri's aides, who had smuggled it through Pakistan to the UK. In it al-Zawahiri, whose wife and children were killed in an American bombing raid in November, hinted at al Qaida's strategy if it faced imminent defeat. "If the entire movement, or part of it, faces a situation where the noose is being tightened around it and its collapse is a matter of days or hours, the movement must pull out as many personnel as possible to the safety of a shelter," he wrote. In Arabic, he said the men left behind could fight to the death confident that their cause would not die with them. American intelligence officials believe al Qaida followed the strategy, letting leaders including bin Laden and al-Zawahiri flee from the cave complex of Tora Bora and leaving behind its foot soldiers to be defeated as the area was pounded by American bombers. Al-Zawahiri is believed to have written the document's final chapters while in a cave near Kandahar, once the Taliban's spiritual capital and now in the hands of the new interim government. He pledged "to spend whatever is left of life in serving the cause of Islam in its ferocious war against the tyrants of the new crusade". ananova.com