Length 30:45, audio mocked up as a video. Narrator is this "emir":
أبي عبيدة يوسف العنابي
Abu 'Ubeida Yusuf al-'Anaabi
also called
أبو يوسف العنابي
Abu Yusuf al-'Anaabi
who has claimed responsibility in the last two months for at least two attacks against Algerian troops.
Unlike Gadahn's recent effort, this audio is long on religion, basically a Wahhabi fatwa, i.e. a cobbling of quotations from the qur'aan and hadith purporting to argue the legitimacy of al-Qa'ida's actions in Algeria. Secondarily, it tries to incite and promise some sort of aggression against al-Andalus, which is the Islamist name for that part of Spain over which the Arabs lost control more than five hundred years ago.
It appears to me that the main purpose of this audio is to paint an agreeable picture of AQIM in the eyes of AQ's financiers and religious superiors back in Arabia. That has been the pattern from them ever since mid-2004, when GSPC leader Nabil Sahraoui was killed and the Islamist movement in North Africa was at a low ebb. One of the surviving GSPC commanders, Abdel-Malik Droukdel, renamed himself Abu Mus'ab Abdul-Wadoud after Zarqawi, renamed his followers al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb, and for months afterward paid profuse obeisances to Usama Bin Ladin and Zarqawi. This policy of acting ultra-Salafist, along with lionization of AQIM by al-Jazeera, has succeeded in gaining new sponsors in Arabia for al-Qa'ida in North Africa. The same is true to a lesser extent for the gang in southern Russia under Doku Umarov, which now calls itself the Caucasus Emirate.
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