Sanaa, February 09: The Yemen-based wing of al Qaeda, in a recording posted on the Internet on Monday, called on Somali insurgents to help gain control over a narrow strait at the mouth of the Red Sea to block U.S. shipments to Israel.
The wing’s deputy leader, Saeed al-Shehri, urged Somalia’s al Shabaab Islamist insurgents to help return the Bab al Mandab strait, which separates Yemen from the Horn of Africa, “to the lands of Islam”.
“At such a time the Bab (al Mandab) will be closed and that will tighten the noose on the Jews (Israel), because through it America supports them by the Red Sea,” Shehri said in the audio recording often used by Islamist groups.
“(Due to the) maritime importance of Bab al Mandab, this would be a great victory,” said Shehri, whose group claimed responsibility for a failed bombing of a U.S. plane on Dec. 25.
The area across the strait from Yemen is far from al Shabaab’s territory which extends from the southern Somali port of Kismayu to the central town of Baidoa and parts of the capital Mogadishu.
While some Somali insurgent figures are suspected of involvement in funding Somali pirate gangs that have targeted commercial shipping in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden, al Shabaab has no known direct presence offshore.
Shehri also called for Muslims in the Arabian Peninsula to wage jihad, or holy war, against Christians and Jews in the region.
Shehri, a former Guantanamo detainee from Saudi Arabia, was one of 30 al Qaeda members that Yemen claimed to have killed in an air strike in December, but this was later denied by the global militant network.
—-Agencies