AL-QA’IDA: ‘THE NEMESIS OF THE WEST’ IS ‘LONE JIHAD’

AL-QA’IDA: ‘THE NEMESIS OF THE WEST’ IS ‘LONE JIHAD’
By Michael S. Smith II

With a cover image of an airplane painted with red, white and blue stripes and featuring an “Open Source Jihad” article titled “The Hidden Bomb” — a teaser for which contained in the contents section states “What America Does Not Expect” — a new edition of al-Qa’ida’s top English-language publication, Inspire, is now available online. While this edition is thematically comparable to previous editions, its publisher is ostensibly making a stronger bid for not only the attention of jihadis in the West, but also coverage of al-Qa’ida by Western news media organizations.

Indeed, having previously attempted to orchestrate an attack on Christmas on a US-bound commercial passenger aircraft, and presently helmed by al-Qa’ida’s deputy commander, it is likely al-Qa’ida’s Yemen-headquartered division is under pressure from above to recapture the imaginations of journalists in the West who have been awestruck by Daesh since last summer. To this end, replete with an image of al-Qa’ida’s 9/11 attacks of 2001, this edition’s cover piece declares, “The nemesis of the West, the hardest blow, is the military tactic of ‘lone Jihad’.”

Meanwhile, target profiles of corporate executives and US government officials like Bill Gates and former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke contained therein are likely to further sway the interests of Western news media organizations. So too might the piece titled “A Message for the American People Regarding the Killing of the Hostage Luke Somers.”

The latest copy of Inspire is accessible via Archive.org, a website that has become a veritable clearinghouse for jihadist propaganda.

Stay tuned for further processing by the DOWNRANGE team.