DUBAI - Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri vowed in a videotape aired Wednesday that the terror group will not stop attacks on US soil as long as the United States strikes Muslims on their land.
"If we are hit in our countries, we will not stop striking you in your country," Zawahiri said in the video broadcast on pan-Arab television station Al-Jazeera.
Zawahiri also said he believed the United States will ultimately have to talk with "the real forces" in the Islamic world in order to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, in a reference to Islamist extremists.
"It seems you will undertake a painful journey of failed negotiations before being forced to go back, God willing, to negotiation with the real forces," said a turbaned Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden's number two also said US President George W. Bush was deceiving Americans by telling them he was going after "terrorists" in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to keep them away from the United States.
"Your safety lies in the following equation: you will not dream of security until we live secure in Palestine and all Muslim lands," Zawahiri said.
"It does not lie in the erroneous equation with which Bush deceives you when he says, 'We strike the terrorists in their countries so that they will not strike in our country'," Zawahiri said.
"As our emir Sheikh Osama bin Laden, God keep him, said, 'Like you bomb, you will be bombed, and like you kill, you will be killed'," he added.
Blair blasts Britons over Iraq war