There's been a lot of chatter amongst the jihadis about this,but Germany got a formal threat from al-Qaeda Friday, when an overt warning came from al-Qaeda leader Bekkay Harrach, alias Al Hafidh Abu Talha al Almani. (The 'al Almani' signifies that he is a German Muslim.) The video, produced by al Qaeda's al Fajr Media Center and distributed via the major jihadi web outlets focu...

Al Qaeda's latest video is pretty strange. But one thing that struck me as especially odd was the slur of President-elect Barack Obama as a "house Negro," which is not actually a direct translation of the Arabic. If you listen to the clip in question, al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri actually calls Obama abid al-beit, or "house slave." Yet al Qaeda translates it as "h...

Richard Barrett, the coordinator of the UN appointed al-Qaeda, Taliban Monitoring Team, has written an appraisal of the effect of the economic downturn on Al Qaeda: Al-Qaeda leaders, unlike their Taliban hosts who are heavily involved in the lucrative drug trade, do not currently have significant financial resources. (Their current financial state contrasts sharply with the

al-Shabaab Associates Itself With Al-Qaeda Originally formed to fight the Somali government, al-Shabaab, according to FBI Director Robert Mueller, may be looking to expand its' base of operations to include the United States. The concern involves U.S. citizens that may have travelled to Somalia for training, and who will have no restrictions to returning back home. Now that Al-Qaeda type atta...

Another nonsense Strategy Page article. The U.S. believes that many al Qaeda leaders have fled to southwest Pakistan (Baluchistan) to escape the increasing number of U.S. UAV missile attacks in the Pushtun tribal areas along the Afghan border. The UAV attacks are apparently following al Qaeda into Baluchistan. Both Britain and the U.S. are sending more

Last week CDR Chris Rawley published a journal article with the Small Wars Journal titled Al Qaeda's Seapower Strategy. Small Wars Journal has been going through a software upgrade so I decided to wait a bit to let them work out the bugs before linking, but with those bugs worked out I want to highlight this article and a specific aspect covered within. For hundreds of years, Arab traders in ...

In Resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda we relied on the CTC Sentinel at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to show that there had begun a steady redeployment of al Qaeda and foreign fighters away from Iraq and to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  “By 2007, jihadist websites from Chechnya to Turkey to the Arab world

After all the nerves and security in New York, Washington and London, the only attempted terror plot on the anniversary of 9/11 appears to have been foiled outside an arts centre in Gothenburg. The Swedish press says that the four people arrested on Saturday night are believed to belong to a cell linked to al-Qaeda. There are no more details yet, but it's a reminder that the al-Qaeda threat h...

Beginning with Resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda where we discussed the Next-Gen Taliban, and going through Interview with Taliban Spokesman Maulvi Omar, for six months The Captain’s Journal has outlined the synthesis of al Qaeda and the new Taliban.  From adoption of suicide tactics to taking a global perspective for jihad in lieu of

A thinly-sourced Washington Post article suggests that al-Qaeda wants John McCain in the White House. This prompted an outburst of rage from the McCain campaign which pointed out some obvious holes in the story, not least the fact that much of it is based on a single web posting on the extremist site al-Hesbah stating: "Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election." As former CIA di...