Following are excerpts from an interview with Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri The interview was conducted on the 4th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and was posted on the Internet on December 7, 2005.

Interviewer: Dr. Ayman, how do you view the calls for reform currently being promoted?

Ayman Al-Zawahiri: Reform can only take place through Jihad for the sake of Allah, and any call for reform that is not through Jihad is doomed to death and failure. We must understand the nature of the battle and conflict. Our enemies will not grant us our rights without Jihad.

No one should be deceived by what happened in Georgia, the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and so on, because those were changes that America wanted and encouraged. It allowed them to happen, and prevented the Russians from interfering.

The Americans will not allow any Islamic regime to assume rule in the heart of the Islamic world, unless it collaborates with them, as is happening now in Iraq. Look at Mubarak preparing himself for a fifth term, after the Americans gave him permission. Look at Abdallah bin Abd Al-'Aziz ascending the throne, after the Americans organized it for him. All the demonstrations, appeals, protests, and initiatives were to no avail. Some people were relying on America.

The same abhorred regimes still practice the same abominable policies, with the blessing of America and in defense of its interests, and the interests of Israel, against the real enemy, which is the resisting mujaheed Islam, and not for the fake Islam that keeps begging and pleading.

Isn't America sending prisoners from Guantanamo and Bagram to Egypt and Jordan, where they are tortured by the very regimes which America insists should respect human rights? Brother Ibn Al-Sheik Al-Liby was taken in a coffin and was transferred from Bagram to the National Security Department in Cairo, where he was severely tortured and held for one year, after which he was returned to Bagram. This is one of thousands of examples.

Muslim brothers, reform will not be achieved through endless talk and chatter about the evils of America, or through shouting yourself hoarse at demonstrations. By now, everybody is talking about the evils of America and its collaborators. Even America's collaborators and the people who have profited from their relations with it talk about its oppression and its leaders' evil deeds.

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Reform can only be achieved by uprooting these corrupt and corrupting regimes, and by establishing a Muslim government that will protect rights, defend sanctities, instate justice, spread the principle of shura, raise the banner of Jihad, and confront the invaders, the enemies of Islam. There will be no reform without all this. Whoever calls for a different path is deceiving himself even more than others.

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Interviewer: Dr. Ayman, how do you view America's call for spreading freedom around the world?

Ayman Al-Zawahiri: America does not want to spread freedom. Rather, it aims at occupying our countries, spreading corruption and promiscuity, encouraging missionary activity for the distorted Christianity, and calling for a new Islam that will facilitate its assault, and promoting its corrupt and corrupting collaborators – an Islam without Jihad, without resistance, and without the principle of doing good and avoiding evil.

Instead of all this nonsense, we invite the Americans to join Islam. Instead of waging losing battles against the Muslims and continuing to oppress and attack them, we call upon them to listen to the voice of truth. We call upon them to reflect honestly upon their actions, and to realize that their current faith – which is a mixture of the materialistic secularism, the distorted Christianity that has nothing to do with Jesus Christ, the hereditary Christian hatred, and their submission to the Zionist hegemony on money and politics – this faith, this mixture, will only lead them to destruction in this world, and torments in the world to come.

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I call upon every reasonable American and Westerner to conduct a personal soul-searching, and to ask himself several clear and honest questions: Are we really calling for freedom, justice, equality, human rights, environmental preservation, and an end to the killing, the destruction, and the plundering war? Are our governments being honest in the reasons they give for our wars against others, and especially the Muslims? Are we really being just when we enable Israel to maintain its occupation of Palestine, to kill Palestinians, destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Judaicize Palestine?

Are the Muslims really terrorists, half crazy, or are they honorable defenders of their religion, freedom, and sanctities? Why did the Muslims attack us in particular? Why didn't they attack the Swiss or Vietnamese, for example? Are the Muslims enemies of the People of the Book, or do they exalt all the prophets, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus? Are the Muslims indeed hostile to the Torah and the New Testament? The Muslims hold these books sacred, but have been demanding for 14 centuries that we provide the correct, original versions of these books, and it we, the Crusaders, who could not comply.

Do you Muslims really have a book that has not been distorted or altered, the likes of which no human can produce? Is there any truth to all these claims, which are being poured into our ears day and night, or are they lies, which have been exposed and shattered by reality?

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I take this opportunity to address our prisoners, who are being held in Crusader jails, and especially our mujaheed Sheik Omar Abd Al-Rahman, as well as our prisoners in America, in Guantanamo, in Abu Ghureib, in Bagram, in the secret American jails around the world, and in the prisons of the tyrants in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, in Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and in Palestine and elsewhere - I say to them: We have not forgotten you. We are still committed to the debt of your salvation. With Allah's strength, we will continue to deliver blows to America and is allies, until we shatter your shackles.