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By Lucy Westcott
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An American-born Al-Qaeda leader denounced ISIS terrorist group for being too extreme and warned there is no place for its militants in paradise if they continue killing Muslims.
In an interview with an Al-Qaeda magazine conducted last fall and obtained by ABC News, Adam Gadahn, born Adam Pearlman, said that "while no one can deny" the military strength of ISIS, continued attacks against Muslims, as well as the brutal murder of British humanitarian aid worker Alan Henning, mean militants face severe punishment, as their crimes "cannot simply be overlooked or forgotten with time, because in Islam there is no statute of limitations."
"And if these wrongs are not brought to an end and rectified here in this world, then a severe punishment has been promised both for those who committed them as well as those who encouraged, condoned or justified them, even if from behind a computer or mobile phone thousands of miles away," Gadahn said in the interview, which was recently published online.
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In January, Gadahn was killed by a drone in a counterterrorism operation at an Al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan. He was born in California and converted to Islam in 1995.
"Oppression of any kind is wrong, and [there] will be darkness for its perpetrator on the Day of Judgment," he said. "The Ummah's [Muslim community's] jihad is not a video game; it is real life, with real consequences, in this world and the next."
Despite once being sympathetic toward ISIS when it was "seen as a weak and oppressed force valiantly fighting brutal tyrannies," Al-Qaeda can no longer continue to support ISIS after the attacking, displacing, killing and enslaving of "largely powerless and defenseless minorities," said Gadahn.
"But now that it has become clear that [ISIS] has—unfortunately—adopted some of the traits, methods and tactics of those same tyrannies, it no longer holds the same place in our hearts that it did once upon a time," said Gadahn.
In the interview, which is more than 80 pages, Gadahn discusses his childhood and how he ended up joining Al-Qaeda, ABC News reports. But most of the interview has Gadahn criticizing ISIS, which declared its intention to form an Islamic "caliphate" across northern Iraq and Syria a year ago. He nevertheless called for attacks in Western countries and praised the 2014 attack on Canada's Parliament. Gadahn also recounted his reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. as "a mix of surprise, amazement and exhilaration as well as some apprehension in the beginning."
Last Friday saw a spate of terrorist attacks around the world, including a mass shooting at a vacation resort in Tunisia and an attack at a factory in Grenoble, France. An ISIS-affiliated group claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Kuwait that killed 27 people. Last week, ISIS committed what activists said was its second biggest massacre of civilians in Syria, killing more than 140 people in the border town of Kobani.
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