'Qaeda would find 9/11-style strike difficult'

US President Barack Obama on Tuesday said that it would be "very difficult" over the next two years for al-Qaida to stage a spectacular terror attack on the scale of the September 11 strikes in 2001.

Obama said that given America's open society, it would always be vulnerable, but argued that as a result of a stepped-up US campaign which had "decimated" al-Qaida's leadership, the country was safer.

`"But for them to be able to mount something that is a big project with a lot of financing, that is very difficult for them to do now," Obama said in an interview.

"They are still dangerous, they are still our number one enemy, we have got to make sure that we don't let up.

"But I think we are in a position over the next couple of years, if we stay on it, it is going to be very difficult for them to mount the kinds of spectacular attacks that we saw on 9/11."

Obama spoke days after a top al-Qaida suspect, US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi, was killed in a suspected US drone strike in Yemen, becoming the latest member of the group to die in a volley of intensified US attacks.

Administration officials confided on Friday that at least 23 senior extremist Islamic leadership figures had been killed or captured, in US or allied operations in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere since August 2009.

The most spectacular coup for the campaign was the killing of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in a US special forces raid on his hideout inside Pakistan in May.

Pentagon: Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri in Pakistan

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is still in Pakistan, a Pentagon official said Wednesday, following the release of a video in which Osama bin Laden's successor blasts the United States.
   
"We have no information to indicate that he is anywhere else than in Pakistan," Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

Zawahiri, a veteran Egyptian militant and long-time al Qaeda number two, took over the jihadist network after bin Laden was killed in a clandestine raid by US Navy commandos in Pakistan on May 2.

Like his slain Saudi-born co-conspirator, Zawahiri has been in hiding since the United States declared a "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and invaded Afghanistan whose Taliban leaders had harbored bin Laden.

Zawahiri -- in the 62-minute video entitled "The Dawn of Imminent Victory," and which featured a speech by bin Laden -- said he was praying this year's Arab Spring would be followed by a "gloomy, bitter-cold American winter."

"The popular revolutions, he stated, are a form of defeat for the United States, just as the 9/11 attacks and its alleged lack of success in Afghanistan and Iraq were also defeats," the US monitoring service SITE said.

Zawahiri was only shown in a still picture in the video, which was released by al Qaeda's media arm, as-Sahab, and posted on jihadist websites on Monday.

The Pentagon said the footage of bin Laden in the video appeared to be the same material found in the US raid on his Pakistan hideout in May, which Washington released but without its soundtrack.