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July 19, 2010 Special Dispatch No.3106 SNIPPET: "Al-Qaeda Second-in-Command Ayman Al-Zawahiri: The Only Hope for Palestine is to Depose the 'Arab Zionists' In a new 1-hour 3-minute audio recording, Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri reaffirms Al-Qaeda's basic strategy regarding Palestine and promised imminent victory in Afghanistan, and addresses words of praise and encouragement to the jihadist groups in North Africa, Somalia, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The video, dated Rajab 1431 (June-July 2010), was produced by Al-Qaeda's media wing, Al-Sahab, and posted on jihadist websites on July 19, 2010. Despite the date shown on the release, it...

KABUL - The arrest of Al-Qaeda commander Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, who worked with Afghanistan's Taliban, is a major success and will be a blow to terror networks, the Afghan defence ministry said Friday. "Al-Iraqi was very important for the terrorists' networks. His arrest is a major success," ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi told AFP. "It will help to get to the high-ranking terrorist network figures and it will have deeply negative effect on the network," he said. A Pentagon spokesman said the militant, on a US "most wanted" list, had been taken into US custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday named the Philippine and Indonesian branches of the International Islamic Relief Organization as fund-raisers for al Qaeda and other terror groups. It also designated one of the Saudi-based organization's high-ranking officials, Abd Al Hamid Sulaiman Al-Mujil, as a fund-raiser for al Qaeda. The action means that no American can have any dealings with the two branches of the organization or with Al-Mujil and that any assets they have in the United States will be frozen. "Al-Mujil has a long record of supporting Islamic militant groups, and he has maintained a cell...

<p>IRBIL, Northern Iraq -- It is hard to imagine another place where Americans are more popular these days. "We like the son of 'Haji Bush,' because he will fight Saddam for us," a young Kurdish driver tells me plain and simple. Others -- young and old, Kurdish or Turkmen, shopkeepers and politicians -- echo similar sentiments about ending the reign of brutality in Baghdad.</p>