Egyptian Jihadists Cite Zawahiri in Video Claiming Responsibility for Cairo Attack

Video posted online Saturday by a little-known Islamist extremist group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, showed a former Egyptian Army officer identified as a suicide bomber calling for violent revolution in the name of Islam against Egypt’s military-installed government.

As our colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh reported from Cairo, a little-known Islamist militant group claimed responsibility for a failed attempt to assassinate Egypt’s interior minister last month in a slickly produced video message posted online Saturday.

The 31-minute propaganda video for Ansar Beit el-Maqdis, or Supporters of Jerusalem, includes footage of the moment a car bomb detonated near the minister’s convoy and what is described as a statement recorded in advance by the suicide bomber who carried out the attack, a former officer in the Egyptian Army. Egyptian officials told The Times the former soldier, Waleed Badr, had been dismissed from the armed forces because of his Islamist sympathies.

The end of the video is edited in such away as to suggest that the group’s call for a violent uprising against the military-backed government that ousted President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in July has been endorsed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the leader of Al Qaeda. The video concludes with footage of Mr. Zawahiri arguing that Egypt’s fundamental conflict is not “a struggle between political parties, but a struggle between Crusaders and Zionists on one side and Islam on the other side.”

A propaganda video posted online Saturday by Egyptian Islamists included undated footage of an interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri produced by As-Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media wing.

The Zawahiri footage is undated, but it seems likely to have been drawn from a previously recorded interview produced by As-Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media wing. The footage of Qaeda’s leader used in the new video bears the Sahab logo and the camera position and backdrop closely match video of Mr. Zawahiri commenting on Egypt discovered in early 2011 by SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization founded by an Israeli-American researcher to track militant websites.

A 2011 video report from SITE Inelligence group, a private organization in Washington that monitors jihadists online, included footage of Ayman al-Zawahiri speaking about Egypt in an interview produced by As-Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media wing.

Egyptian militants citing Mr. Zawahiri as inspiration for such an attack on the security forces seems like an indication that Egypt has in some ways circled back to where it was nearly two decades ago. As Lawrence Wright explained in The New Yorker when Mr. Zawahiri became Al Qaeda’s leader, the militant “inaugurated the use of suicide bombers with his failed attack on the Egyptian Interior Minister, Hasan al-Alfi, in 1993,” and “also introduced the propaganda ploy of the martyrdom video, which would become a signature of Al Qaeda.”

At another point in the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis video, Mr. Zawahiri is quoted criticizing the Brotherhood for failing to emphasize “the sovereignty of Shariah,” oppose Israel and reject Egypt’s “Americanized military power.”

A screenshot from video posted online by Egyptian Islamists showing Waleed Badr, a former Egyptian Army officer identified as a suicide bomber.

In the martyrdom portion of the new video, the man identified as the suicide bomber in the attack, Waleed Badr, was shown reading a statement criticizing the Brotherhood for its adherence to what he called “this farce called the democratic Islam” and urging the group “to keep away from methods created by the West, which wanted to impose them on us to spoil our religion, but to no avail.” His political exhortations were surrounded by footage of the Egyptian security forces beating protesters in Tahrir Square at an earlier stage of the revolution and dispersing Islamist protesters with deadly force this summer.

Mr. Badr was also recorded wearing a military uniform and speaking earnestly into the camera while sitting in the driver’s seat of the car he would later blow up near the interior minister’s convoy. He condemned the Egyptian military for its use of force against Islamists and called the Muslim Brotherhood naïve for opting mainly for nonviolent protests. “Why do you shy away from armed confrontation?” Mr. Badr asked. “From a logical point of view, iron must be fought with iron and fire by fire.”

The video includes a slow-motion footage of the moment that the car exploded on a crowded Cairo street, sending debris into the air and pedestrians running for cover.

Video posted online by a militant group in Egypt included footage of an explosion that targeted the interior minister’s convoy last month.

Although the Egyptian interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, survived the attempt on his life in September, at least one police officer was killed and dozens of people, both police and civilians, were injured.

According to The Long War Journal, an analysis of the video message by SITE also identified statements from Osama bin Laden and Abu Muhammad al ‘Adnani al Shami, a spokesman for the Qaeda-inspired militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.