October 22, 2007

Bin Laden Urges Iraqi Muslims To Unite

In a new audio recording purportedly made by Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind called on warring Islamic factions to look past their differences.

"Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks," bin Laden says, in a tape broadcast by Al Jazeera. "Beware of division... The Muslim world is waiting for you to gather under one banner."

The recording, titled "A Message To The People Of Iraq," seems directed at Sunni and Shiite extremists. The U.S. maintains a heavy presence in Iraq four years after the fall of Baghdad largely because of ethnosectarian violence between the groups. Al-Qaida in Iraq, a particularly violent Sunni Muslim group, has so alienated many Iraqi Sunnis that they have joined forces with U.S. fighters in the Anbar province. More recently, Iraqi Shiites have begun distancing themselves from Shiite militias, led by the Mahdi Army.

"The strength of faith is in the strength of the bond between Muslims and not that of a tribe or that of nationalism," bin Laden says in the tape. "Everybody can make a mistake, but the best of them are those who admit their mistakes."

As with all messages that purportedly come from bin Laden, this one will be scrutinized by the intelligence community. Bin Laden called on Pakistanis to remove Pervez Musharraf from power in a recording released late last month, and he also released a video to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks a couple of weeks prior.

Posted at 4:45 PM
Posted to: Al-Qaida, Iraq, Middle East, Terrorism
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