Cairo, May 24: An American-Yemeni cleric whose Internet sermons are believed to have helped inspire attacks on the US has advocated the killing of American troops in an al-Qaeda video released Sunday.
Anwar al-Awlaki has been added to the CIA’s list of targets for assassination despite his American citizenship. He is one of the few English-speaking radical clerics able to explain to young Muslims the philosophy of violent jihad.
The US-born al-Awlaki moved to Yemen in 2004 and is in hiding there after being linked to the suspects in the November shooting at an Army base in Fort Hood, Texas, and the December attempt to blow up a US jetliner bound for Detroit. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American arrested after a failed attempt to set of a bomb in New York, also said that he was inspired by al-Awlaki.
“Those who might be killed in a plane are merely a drop of water in a sea,” he said in the video in response to a question about Muslim groups that disapproved of the airliner plot because it targeted civilians. Al-Awlaki used the 45-minute video to justify civilian deaths by accusing the US of intentionally killing a million Muslim civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
“American civilians are to blame,” he said, because,”the American people, in general, are taking part in this and they elected this administration and they are financing the war.” He added that the Prophet Muhammad also sent forces into battles that claimed civilian lives. The video was produced by the media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The al-Qaeda’s media arm said the video was its first interview with the cleric.
In the video, al-Awlaki praised the Fort Hood shooting accused and the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. He referred to them as his “students.” Speaking of Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood attacker, the cleric said, “What he did was heroic and great… I ask every Muslim serving in the US Army to follow suit.”“As for the Americans, I will never surrender to them,” he said.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the US is “actively trying to find” al-Awlaki.
-Agencies