Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgents in Yemen and Somalia have threatened to avenge the killing of Osama bin Laden by US commandos and are chillingly warning the West of a bloodier jihad to come.
Pakistan Wednesday saw the first possible violent reaction to bin Laden’s May 2 death in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, as drive-by attackers threw grenades at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Karachi.
The leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wahishi, said in a statement posted on an Islamist website that the “ember of jihad (holy war) is brighter” following the May 2 killing of bin Laden.
The Yemen-based fugitive warned Americans not to fool themselves that the “matter will be over” with the killing of bin Laden, the Saudi-born architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“Do not think of the battle superficially…. What is coming is greater and worse, and what is awaiting you is more intense and harmful,” Wahishi said, according to a translation by the US-based SITE monitoring group.
Top Shebab Islamists in Somalia, including Muktar Robow, Sheikh Hasan Dahir Aweys and US-born Omar Hamami — better known as Abu Mansoor al-Amriki — said they also planned revenge for bin Laden’s killing “very soon.”
“We are sending a message to (US President Barack) Obama and (Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton that we will avenge the death of our leader Sheikh Osama bin Laden very soon,” Hamami said.
“Osama is dead but the holy war is not dead. Mujahedeen fighters all over the world are fully prepared to revenge the death of our leader.”
The Shebab, who control much of Somalia, pose a serious security threat in the region where Al-Qaeda operatives bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
The warnings came as top US Senator John Kerry announced a trip to mend fences with a resentful Pakistan, where bin Laden was gunned down, but also to seek answers on how he came to be there.
The United States has warned of the threat posed by Islamist militancy in Yemen, the homeland of bin Laden’s father, and has warned of the potential for the country to become a new staging ground for Al-Qaeda.
AQAP was born of a January 2009 merger between the Saudi and Yemeni Al-Qaeda branches. It claimed a failed attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound US airliner in December 2009 and was accused in October of sending parcel bombs addressed to US synagogues that were disguised inside computer printers.
Four days after bin Laden was killed in the US raid on his sprawling compound about two hours’ drive from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, a US drone attack targeted US-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi in southern Yemen.
The cleric, who Washington says has strong links to Al-Qaeda, survived the attack but two AQAP members were killed.
In Karachi, two men on a motorcycle threw two grenades at the heavily fortified Saudi consulate and escaped despite coming under fire from security guards, officials said.
“We are seeing this incident in the present context,” provincial government official Sharfuddin Memon told AFP. “It could be a reaction of the Osama incident.”
“We fear that desperate elements are planning to launch a big attack. We are taking precautionary measures in this regard,” he warned.
Bin Laden’s killing has not ignited mass protests in Pakistan, where more than 4,240 people have died in bomb attacks blamed on the radical Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the last four years, but small gatherings have vowed revenge.
Saudi Arabia expelled bin Laden in 1991 and later revoked his nationality. The government in Riyadh, which is allied to the authorities in Islamabad, last week welcomed his killing as a boost to international anti-terror efforts.
But the discovery of bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad after a decade-long manhunt has plunged testy relations between Islamabad and Washington deeper into trouble.
Pakistan is an uneasy ally in the US-led war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan, and receives billions of dollars in US aid annually.
Senator Kerry said that when he traveled to Pakistan early next week he hoped to resolve some of the puzzles lingering since the Al-Qaeda leader was finally unearthed and shot dead by elite US Navy SEALs.
“There are some serious questions, obviously, there are some serious issues that we’ve just got to find a way to resolve together,” Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.
Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf warned in an interview with ABC News that the United States will be “a loser” if it alienates Pakistan in the war against Al-Qaeda and Islamic militants.
