DUBAI: Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri said that Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah had been exposed as a tool of Iranian expansionism, in an audio message posted online yesterday.
Zawahiri said that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s public acknowledgement in late April that its fighters had intervened in neighbouring Syria in support of President Bashar Al Assad, a key Tehran ally, “tore off the mask he always hid behind.”
“The jihadist uprising in Muslim Syria has exposed the ugly face of Hasan Nasrallah, the head of the rejectionist (Shia) Safavid (Iranian) plan for Syria,” the Al Qaeda leader said.
Sunni extremists describe Shias as rejectionists. The Safavids were an Iranian imperial dynasty of the 16th and 17th centuries.
“It has been revealed to the Islamic Umma (faithful) that he is just an instrument in the rejectionist Safavid plan that aims to spread the hegemony of the vali-e faqih,” he said, referring to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Zawahiri also hit out at continued “crimes” against Al Qaeda suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba under US President Barack Obama. “The (hunger) strike of our jailed brothers exposes the real ugly face of America,”
he added. AFP
