In a nearly 16 minute audio file posted on jihadist Internet forums marking the fifth anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq, Zawahiri, known as Al-Qaeda’s ideological thinker, called on Muslims to fight for creating a greater Muslim state.

“We will only get our rights back with our own hands and not through beggary or fraudulent elections,” Zawahiri said on Thursday, according to the SITE summary.

Zawahiri’s talk, titled “Five years after the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by the Tyrants,” contains references to US Iraqi commander General David Petraeus’s April 8 testimony to the US Congress, and to a textile worker strike in Egypt on April 6 as evidence that it was a recent recording, according to SITE.

The monitoring service said Zawahiri called on Muslims to make Iraq a “fortress of Islam” and, underscoring the Sunni Muslim orientation of Al-Qaeda, he referred to a plot against Iraq by the United States together with Shiite Iran, which he said would lead to an explosive situation in the Middle East.