CAIRO: The “liberation of Jerusalem” requires beating the west “in their own backyard” and hitting the economy to show the “price of support for crimes by Israel against Muslims and Islam,” said al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in an audio recording aired Sunday on an al-Qaeda-affiliated network, Youm7 reported.
The at-large leader called for jihadis to mobilize, adding “The Americans and the Russians and the Iranians and the Alawites and Hezbollah are coordinating their war against us.”
Zawahiri was among the hundreds arrested following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and has has a bounty on his head by the American government since the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Zawahiri’s brother Mohamed was acquitted in mid-November by an Egyptian court of forming a terrorist cell.