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On May 30, 2013, jihad supporters on Twitter disseminated the eleventh issue of Inspire, the English-language jihadi magazine produced by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In the issue, which includes threats to the American people by the group's military commander Qassem Al-Rimi, AQAP makes an effort to capitalize on the Boston and London attacks to incite further attacks.
For the first time, the link to this latest issue - unlike the previous ones, which were published on Al-Qaeda affiliated jihadi forums - was released via Twitter. The first downloadable link was posted on a Twitter account belonging to "Muhammad Al-Shammary," who said he had received an email with English and Arabic copies of the magazine. Al-Shammary, who uses the handle @muhammad115599 and about whom very little is known, then posted the password needed to unlock the link. Prior to Al-Shammary's tweets, Yemeni journalist 'Abd Al-Razzaq Al-Jamal, who is associated with the group, had posted links to the two copies; however, they did not in fact contain the magazine. Al-Jamal was the first to break the news about the magazine's release, when he posted excerpts and pictures from the latest issue onto his Facebook page. He attributed his failed attempts to release the entire magazine to power outages in Yemen, where he lives.
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The relatively small size of the issue as compared to previous ones, and the sloppy translation and editing, indicate that AQAP has not found an adequate replacement for magazine founders Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric, and Samir Khan, another American.
Most of the articles in this issue focus on the Boston Marathon bombing. Inspire's publishers clearly believe that they deserve credit for providing the perpetrators with the motivation and operational know-how for the attack. More importantly, AQAP uses the current issue to incite Muslims in the West to carry out similar attacks, by emulating the Tsarnaev brothers and the Woolwich attackers. Thus, one prominent feature in the issue is a message from AQAP's military commander, Qassem Al-Rimi, who warns the American people that such attacks will continue, and that their government is unable to stop them.
MEMRI will be sending out a full review and analysis of the 11th issue of Inspire magazine. The following are the first reports that MEMRI is releasing on Inspire's 11th issue:
