On Thursday, al Qaeda’s chief Ayman al-Zawahiri announced in a video that he would “raise the flag of jihad” in India and start a branch of the al Qaeda militant group in the subcontinent.
Zawahiri said that the purpose for the expansion is “to wage jihad against its enemies, to liberate its land, to restore its sovereignty, and to revive its Caliphate,” and to “rescue” those who are undergoing “injustice, oppression, persecution, and suffering,” in India and surrounding areas such as Myanmar and Bangladesh.
Many are conjecturing that al Qaeda’s ulterior motive in releasing the video is to gain more militants and attention for their own group amid the growing popularity of the Islamic State.
“It’s al-Zawahiri’s obvious way of getting some of the limelight back,” said Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst.
“In the past year, al-Qaeda has lost ground to the Islamic State, an al-Qaeda splinter group that has surpassed it in both ruthless, jihadist savagery as well as strategic gains,” wrote Ishaan Tharoor from the Washington Post. “The Islamic State commands real territory in Iraq and Syria and boasts a recruitment network and money-making operation that has thrust it into the forefront of world attention.”
S.K. Nanda, the senior bureaucrat in the home department of Gujarat, “In the wake of this al Qaeda video, we will be on higher alert,” according to a Reuters report.
The Indian main governmental party, Bharatiya Janata Party, expressed confidence that the threat, although a “matter of serious concern,” is “nothing to worry about,” according to a spokesman from the party. “We have a strong government at the federal level.”
