Ayman al-Zawahiri blasted Riyadh and Gulf states in his latest audio recording
The leader of Al-Qaeda has accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the late 2015 assassination of Jaysh al-Islam chief Zahran Alloush, a prominent rebel figure with close ties to the Gulf kingdom.
In an audiotape released Monday, Ayman al-Zawahiri claimed Riyadh wanted to split insurgents in Syria while also slamming Gulf Sheikhs.
He blasted Saudi Arabia for “luring some to sign a document accepting pluralism,” a reference to the December 2015 Riyadh summit that brought together rebel groups to form a unified team to join negotiations for a Syria peace deal.
Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front, rejected the Saudi-sponsored opposition conference, prompting an angry riposte from Jaysh al-Islam, one of the signatories to the final statement of the diplomatic meeting.
Zawahiri said that following the conference, Saudi Arabia sought to “expel mujahideen” from the ranks of rebels and then “killed Zahran Alloush.”
The Jaysh al-Islam leader was killed in a precision strike on December 25, 2015 that the Syrian regime claimed it conducted, although rebels say that Russia conducted the raid that killed one of the top Islamist rebel commanders in the war-torn country.
“[Riyadh] sought to split the ranks of the mujahideen with a false truce,” Zawahiri added, in possible reference to the since-failed cessation of hostilities brokered by Russia and the US that went into effect in late February 2016.
“The truce did not stop the jets of the Russians and the Nusayri Baathists from killing Muslims and burning their homes.”
The Al-Qaeda chief also directed his ire against “Gulf Sheikhs,” who he said were “corrupting jihad” in the Levant.
According to Zawahiri, “corrupted” jihadists “pant behind the Gulf sheikhdoms and the Saudi Arabian mirage to gain access to any government, even if they were subjected to the rule of ‘hotel strugglers’ from the secularist scum,” a derogatory reference to Western-backed Syrian opposition figures based in the region.
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