Bin Laden tape urges boycott of Iraq election

WASHINGTON – Any Iraqi who votes in the Jan. 30 election will become “a nonbeliever,” according to an audiotape attributed to Osama bin Laden and broadcast on Monday by al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable network.

In calling on Iraqis to boycott the election, the speaker praised Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as an “emir,” or prince of the al Qaeda organization in Iraq, who is leading the fight against “the Americans and (Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad) Allawi’s renegade government.”

“The groups affiliated with him are good,” the speaker says. “We were pleased with their daring operations.”

Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, has asserted responsibility for many of the suicide bombings and beheadings in Iraq over the past year and in October publicly pledged his fealty to bin Laden.

U.S. intelligence officials had “moderate confidence” that the voice on the two-minute, 12-second tape was bin Laden’s, an official said Monday.

The speaker appears to be responding to al-Zarqawi’s October commitment of allegiance.

“We in the al Qaeda organization warmly welcome their union with us,” the speaker says, according to a U.S. government translation of the new tape. “This is a great step toward rendering successful the efforts of the mujaheddin to establish the state of right and annihilate the state of injustice.”

The tape appears to continue public relations operations that have been carried on through news media by bin Laden and al-Zarqawi over the past six months.

This one was pegged to the Iraq election next month, which is to select a national assembly that will, in turn, draw up a constitution and pick new government officials.

It came on the same day that Iraq’s main Sunni Muslim political organization, the Iraqi Islamic Party, joined other Sunni groups in saying that it would not participate and was withdrawing its candidates from the elections.

Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi are ultra-orthodox Sunni Muslims. Al-Zarqawi initially focused his operations in Iraq on rallying the Sunnis to fight the occupation.

In Monday’s message, the speaker identified as bin Laden said opposition to the election was based on the election’s origins, which he described as “the constitution which U.S. occupier (former Coalition Provisional Administrator L. Paul) Bremer imposed,” calling it “man-made, pagan,” not based on Islamic sharia law and therefore “one of infidels.”

Bin Laden’s most recent tape was a much longer audio recording in which he discussed his opposition to U.S. policy in Saudi Arabia.

In it, he called on the Saudi government to break away from Washington’s leadership and to reform before the government was violently overthrown.

Before that, bin Laden appeared in a videotape released just before the U.S. presidential election.

Al-Zarqawi, too, has made video and audio appearances. Among the most dramatic al-Zarqawi statements to become public, however, was a letter to bin Laden in January 2004, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence.

In it al-Zarqawi described in detail his plans to rally Iraqis against the Americans, a campaign he has since carried out.

The United States has established rewards of $25 million for anyone who provides information that leads to the death or capture of bin Laden or al-Zarqawi.