'Qaeda wants to portray Modi as enemy of Islam'

Al-Qaeda, which has announced the creation of a separate wing for India, wants to portray Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an enemy of Islam and as such India should take its threat "very seriously", a well-known American counter-terror expert said on Thursday even as the US tried to downplay the terrorist outfit's capabilities.
"This video, the first from Zawahiri this year, should be taken very seriously. Al-Qaida wants to portray Prime Minister Modi as an enemy of Islam," ex-CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, who is considered to be one of the US's top experts on counter-terrorism, said.
"From its base in Pakistan and with its close links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Qaeda is a dangerous menace to India," Riedel said when asked about the latest video of Zawahiri announcing al-Qaeda's creation of a new branch for the Indian subcontinent to wage jihad in India, including in Kashmir, Gujarat and Assam with the goal of establishing a caliphate and impose sharia ranging from Afghanistan to Myanmar.
Zawahiri had announced new branch of al-Qaeda called "Qaidat al-Jihad in the Indian Subcontinent", "seeking to raise the flag of jihad, return Islamic rule, and imposing Sharia across the Indian subcontinent," in the video which was posted on various social media websites including YouTube.
Reiterating that the new Indian government should take the threat very seriously, Riedel said that New Delhi should increase its counter-terrorism co-operation with the US and Afghanistan.
At the same time, she reiterated that the US remains committed to dismantling al-Qaida anywhere that it poses a threat to the US and make sure that it doesn't renew its threat to America. The announcement by al-Qaeda that it has formed a branch for operating in India is not an indication of the terrorist outfit gaining new capabilities, the US yesterday said, asserting that it is committed to dismantling the group.
"We do not regard the announcement as an indication of new capabilities by al-Qaeda, which has long been active throughout the region," Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson of the National Security Council at the White House, said.
The US, she said, has robust counter-terrorism partnerships in the region to combat al-Qaeda's destabilising influence, to deny it safe haven, to counter violent extremism, and to build resilience against terrorist groups.
This is expected to be one of the key topics of discussion between the two countries when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Washington later this month to meet US President Barack Obama.