Associated Press Posted online: Thursday, July 06, 2006 at 1320 hours IST
Cairo, July 6: The wife of slain al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi said she feared for her husband's life and warned him to leave Iraq, but that he refused to "betray" his religion, in a statement posted on the Internet on Thursday.
The woman, who identified herself only as "Um Mohammed," said she advised al-Zarqawi to leave Iraq temporarily and give orders to his deputies from outside the country.
But she said he "gave me an angry look and said, 'me, me? I can't betray my religion and get out of Iraq.'"
"In the name of God, I will not leave Iraq until victory or martyrdom," she quoted al-Zarqawi as saying.
"As long as our sheikh Osama, our leader and the one who makes infidels angry, as long as he is fine, our agony from the death of our leader Abu Musab is bearable," the woman said referring to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Speaking directly to bin Laden, she said her husband was "only one soldier in the ranks of your Army, and there are so many soldiers."
The statement appeared on an Islamic web site that frequently airs militant messages.
Al-Zarqawi died June 7 in a US air strike outside Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad. The woman identified herself by the same name as in an interview published Sunday in an Italian newspaper, in which she said al-Qaeda leaders sold out al-Zarqawi to the US in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for bin Laden.
