Al-Qa’ida Declares “Jewish-Crusader” War; Will Target US, Jews in Response to Trump Declaration

A senior commander in Al-Qa’ida’s Yemen franchise – arguably the organization’s most lethal – has called for Muslims worldwide to “rise up and attack the Americans and the Jews everywhere.” The message was delivered in a video released on Monday and featuring Khalid Batarfi, who called President Trump’s statement that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital “the declaration of a new Jewish-Crusader war.” The title of the video is “Our Duty to Jerusalem” and in it, Batarfi charges “every Muslim in America and the Western countries in the world” to “kill every Jew, by running him over, or stabbing him, or by using against him any weapon, or by burning their homes.” Batarfi’s group, Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, is considered by American intelligence to be the most dangerous of all of the Al-Qa’ida units and is responsible for the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris.