... who had a brief but splitting headache...
ancestral homeland -- has warned Americans of a bloodier jihadist struggle to come following the terror criminal mastermind's killing by US commandos.
The warning from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came as top US Senator John
I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, the Senate's current
foreign policy expert, filling the vacated wingtips of Joe Biden...
announced a trip to mend fences with a resentful Pakistain, where bin Laden was bumped off, but also to seek answers on how he came to be there.
| "Bin Laden? The man was a friend of a friend. He showed up at our door one day with wives and kiddies in tow -- we couldn't just turn him away. But it's not like we put him up in a palace with maids and dancing girls!" |
A local official said authorities were taking measures fearing a "big attack" to come.
AQAP leader 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, according to the SITE monitoring group.
The Yemen-based runaway 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 SITE translation.
"We promise Allah that we will remain firm in the covenant and that we will continue the march, and that the death of the sheikh will only increase our persistence to fight the Jews and the Americans in order to take Dire Revenge™." 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 Pak capital Islamabad, a dronezap targeted US-Yemeni holy man Anwar al-Awlaqi in southern Yemen.
The holy man, who Washington says has strong links to al-Qaeda, survived the attack but two AQAP members were killed.