On the twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack, a 60-minute video of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was released by As Sahab Media. This was announced on Twitter by Rita Katz, director of Site Intelligence Group. As Sahab is the official PR outfit of the al Qaeda leadership.
The video is titled ‘Jerusalem will never be Judaized’. The video references the events that took place after last December when rumours circulated about Ayman al-Zawahiri’s, a former Egyptian doctor, death. The video had no reference to the Taliban victory in Afghanistan just under a month ago.
“The current situation requires that we exhaust the enemy’s forces as long as he complains about economic and military problems,” said al Zawahiri. He said that one of the “main operations in this regard is Tel Saman”, referring to the attack carried out on January 1 against a Russian military base in northeastern Syria. A car bomb had detonated near a Russian military base in northeast Syria on January 1 2021, the first such jihadist attack in the area against the ally of Damascus.
“This operation is a practical example of how to break the military siege of the enemy” continued the leader of al Qaeda who in the video referred to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan but not to the victory of the Taliban.
He also criticized the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, which he described as “traitors”.
In the video, al Zawahiri praises, among other things, the author of the attack on the American military base in Pensacola, the Saudi student Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani who killed three people in 2019 before being killed by the police.