Verne Strickland / September 15, 2011
The leader of Al-Qaeda has called on Muslims to wage attacks inside the United States, to wreak instability that will “bleed America economically”.
In an audio message released on Friday, two days after the anniversary of
September 11th, Ayman al-Zawahiri said America was not a “mythic power” and
that it could be defeated even through small-scale strikes by “one brother
or a few of the brothers”.
“We should bleed America economically by provoking it to continue in its
massive expenditure on its security, for the weak point of America is its
economy, which has already begun to stagger due to the military and security
expenditure,” he said, according to SITE, a jihadist monitoring group.
“America is not a mythic power and the Americans, after all, are humans who can be defeated, felled and punished.”
Zawahiri urged the Islamic world to “abandon the dollar and replace it with a
currency of other countries that are not taking part in the aggression
against us”. He also said that Muslims should refuse to buy goods from
America and its allies, as such spending only helped to fund US military
action in Muslim lands.
As well as mounting small, “disparate” assaults, Zawahiri urged fellow members
of his extremist group to “watch and wait” and seize any opportunity to
conduct a large strike against the US, similar to the 9/11 attack that
killed almost 3000 people.
His speech picked up on the belief held by former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin
Laden that targeting economic institutions can destroy the United States.