Joseph H. Felter

Brian Fishman

Jarret Brachman

On 16 December 2007, Ayman al-Zawahiri invited journalists and Jihadist enthusiasts to ask him questions via the primary Jihadist web forums. Zawahiri promised to personally answer some of those questions in a subsequent statement. On 2 April 2008, As-Sahab Media released the first part of Zawahiri's response in the form of a one hour, forty-three minute audio statement, which was accompanied by Arabic and English transcripts. The following analysis of Zawahiri's Part I response is broken into three sections. The first evaluates the most important themes that Zawahiri addressed on 2 April, namely HAMAS, the killing of innocents, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Lebanese Jihadist group Fatah al-Islam, and Zawahiri's dispute with Sayyid Imam Sharif, the former Emir of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The second section explores the issues that Zawahiri mentioned but failed to actually answer, namely al-Qa'ida’s relationship with other insurgents in Iraq and al-Qa'ida’s position toward Iran. Because Part II of his responses is forthcoming, we can only assume that Zawahiri is saving more complete answers on those questions. In the third section, we are pleased to offer our analysis of 1,888 questions that were posed to Zawahiri on the password-protected Al-Ekhlass and Al-Hesbah websites. As discussed above, the CTC acquired these questions as part of its ongoing effort to identify and release relevant information for scholars, researchers and the global public that is contained in U.S. government databases. Additionally, we have made these questions available, in their entirety, on the CTC website (http://ctc.usma.edu/).

Jarret Brachman

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