Bin Laden: Saudis are main enemy in Iraq

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- As President Bush visits Saudi Arabia, al-Qaida leaders now say the kingdom, not the U.S military, is their main enemy in Iraq.

In an hour-long audio message last month, Osama bin Laden told Iraq's mujahedin that their main enemy was now Saudi Arabia, rather than the U.S military, according to a new analysis.

The Dec. 29 message, "leaves no doubt that the Islamists' main enemy in Iraq is now Saudi Arabia, not the supposedly militarily defeated United States," writes Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst who once ran the agency's hunt for bin Laden.

The message, released in Arabic without English subtitles by as-Sahab, al-Qaida's multimedia arm, was the second from bin Laden in a few weeks, both aimed squarely at addressing what Scheuer calls al-Qaida's "dour recognition of its inability to control post-occupation events in Iraq."

Scheuer's analysis was published last week by the Jamestown Foundation, a counter-terrorism think tank with historic ties to U.S. intelligence.

In the most recent message, starting again from the proposition that the U.S.-led coalition has been military defeated and will soon leave, bin Laden draws on the lessons of the Jihadi experience in Afghanistan.

Though militarily victorious over the Soviets, the Mujahedin there were unable to consolidate their success, says bin Laden, in part because "America exerted great efforts … to convince the Afghan leaders through the governments of Riyadh and Islamabad to join a national unity government with communists and secularists from the West."

"The same thing applies to Iraq today," bin Laden added, warning that the Saudis were again acting as "agents" for U.S. policy.

"My talk to you," he said, "is about the plots that are being hatched by … America, in cooperation with its agents in the region, to steal the fruit of the blessed jihad in the land of the two rivers (Iraq), and what we should do to foil these plots."

As in his earlier message to Iraqi insurgents, bin Laden made an appeal for unity among the mujahedin.