On September 15, 2010, Al-Qaeda's media wing Al-Sahab released a new audio recording from the organization's second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahiri. The 45-minute message is titled "A Victorious Ummah, A Broken Crusade: Nine Years After the Start of the Crusader Campaign," and was released with English subtitles, as well as in Urdu and Pashtu versions. The transcript provided by Al-Sahab is dated Ramadan 1431 (August-September 2010), and a mention of the recent floods in Pakistan indicates that the audio message is indeed recent.
In the audio recording, Al-Zawahiri claims that the mujahideen's victory in Afghanistan is already a given: "No one doubts it will happen, not even the American-led Crusader coalition itself." The main thrust of Al-Zawahiri's message is to draw the lessons from this victory, and to use it as an argument in favor of Al-Qaeda's approach of unrelenting jihad, and against the approach of its critics in the Muslim world - the Muslim Brotherhood, establishment Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, governments such as that of Pakistan or the transitional government in Somalia, and others. There is little new in these arguments, which recur constantly in Al-Qaeda propaganda, and are simply pegged to different events and circumstances. ...
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