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CAIRO - AL-QAEDA No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri has produced a book justifying armed struggle and slamming fellow Muslim militants who have turned against violence.
Zawahiri, the terror group's top strategist who is seen by many counter-terrorism experts as its operational chief rather than Osama bin Laden, hit out at former radical colleagues in Egyptian prisons who have disavowed violence in the 212-page tirade.
The book was published on Sunday on militant Islamic websites.
It is the latest salvo in an intellectual war between the ideological founders of Al-Qaeda and Islamic militants, many of whom have become disillusioned with the suicide bombings and attacks on civilians.
'This message that I present to the reader today is the most difficult, if not the hardest I have written in my life,' Zawahiri writes in the introduction to Exonerations, published by Al-Qaeda's media wing, Al-Sahab.
He criticised a series of 'revisions' renouncing violence published by prominent jailed Islamic thinkers such as Sayed Imam, once a leader in Egypt's Islamic Jihad group.
Imam's writings in the 1980s laid an Islamic legal basis for violent action against 'infidel' regimes. But in 'revisions' published last year, he argued that such violence is banned under Islamic law.
Views like Imam's, wrote Zawahiri, serve 'the interests of the Crusader-Zionist alliance with the Arab leaders to ...drag (the mujahideen) away from the confrontation'.
He said the revisions were instigated by the United States to weaken a movement that had inflicted so many defeats on them.
'The entire crime of Al-Qaeda and the mujahideen is that they have faced the Americans, the Jews and the agents, and so American-made propaganda, such as this document, have been unleashed so that the world would forget and ignore the real criminals,' he wrote.
An advertisement for the book, posted in a video eulogy of a slain terrorist on militant websites, said it is a way to counteract an image of the Islamic world as 'helpless, submissive, fearful'.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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