Dubai: Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged Muslims to work together to liberate ‘Muslim lands’, including Indian-administered Kashmir, from occupiers.
Zawahri urged Muslims to reject any deal that gives ‘infidels’ the right to control Muslim lands – an apparent reference to Egypt’s 1979 peace deal with Israel, reports The Nation.
Zawahiri said these lands included the present day Israel and the Palestinian territories, Russia’s Chechnya and other parts of the Caucasus region, Indian-administered Kashmir, the Spanish-ruled North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla claimed by Morocco, and East Turkestan in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.
Zawahiri said this in a document outlining how Muslims should run their affairs. The statement, entitled ‘Supporting Islam’ and posted by the militants’ publishing arm on an Islamist website, also called for the re-establishment of the medieval Islamic Caliphate to unite Muslims.
He also urged Muslims to use Muslim law to resolve disputes and “refuse judgment by any other principles, beliefs and laws”, including the United Nations.
Zawahri called on Muslims to work to set up a caliphate that “does not recognise nation state, national links or the borders imposed by the occupiers, but establishes a rightly guided caliphate following in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad”.
The caliphate was a political institution founded after the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad that administered vast empires formed after the Arab conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, Iberia and western Asia. (ANI)