Audiotape attributed to Zarqawi

From combined dispatches

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Senior al Qaeda operative Abu Musab Zarqawi pledged to carry out more attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and called for the country’s Sunni Muslims to fight Shi’ites, according to an audiotape aired on an Islamist Web site yesterday.

It was the first tape of any kind attributed to Zarqawi, also known as Ahmed al-Khalayleh, to be made public. He is thought to be in Iraq.

The 33-minute tape’s authenticity could not be verified, and a U.S. official in Washington said analysts were examining it. A Middle East counterterrorism official told the Associated Press in Amman, Jordan, that preliminary indications from people familiar with Zarqawi’s voice and the tone of the threat suggest it is his.

The tape appeared hours before a Jordanian court convicted Zarqawi in absentia and sentenced him to death for the 2002 killing of a U.S. aid official in a terror conspiracy linked to al Qaeda. U.S. officials have offered a $10 million reward for his capture, saying he is trying to build a network of foreign militants in Iraq.

A statement circulating in Iraq and signed by anti-American groups last month said Zarqawi had been killed earlier in U.S. bombing in northern Iraq. A senior U.S. official denied the contention.

The speaker on the tape took responsibility for the March 17 car bombing of a Baghdad hotel that killed seven persons — an indication that the tape was made recently.

The speaker also said that his group had carried out the assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, the leader of Iraq’s largest Shi’ite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Ayatollah al-Hakim was killed in a car bombing in Iraq on Aug. 29.

The speaker also threatened to kill Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command; L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq; and “their generals, soldiers and associates.”

One theme of the audiotape echoed that of a letter U.S. authorities had released earlier this year in which Zarqawi purportedly wrote to other al Qaeda leaders that the best way to undermine U.S. policy in Iraq was to turn the country’s religious communities against each other.

Iraq’s Shi’ite majority had been suppressed under Saddam Hussein, who favored his Sunni community. The toppled leader’s loyalists in heavily Sunni parts of the country and foreign fighters have been blamed for the bulk of attacks against U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

On the tape, the speaker said Shi’ite Iraqis were not true Muslims and were “the ears and the eyes of the Americans” in Iraq. He called upon Sunni Muslims in the country to “burn the earth under the occupiers’ feet.”

Zarqawi was among eight Islamist militants sentenced to death by Jordan’s state security court yesterday for their role in the slaying of a U.S. diplomat, which was blamed on al Qaeda.

Zarqawi already had been sentenced to death in absentia last year for plotting attacks on Westerners.

Libyan Salem Saad bin Sweid and Jordanian Yasser Friehat, who were accused of shooting diplomat Laurence Foley on the doorstep of his home in October 2002, were among those given the death sentence.