Young Al-Qaeda trainees in Syria hail 9/11 attacks

Video appears to show terror group giving paramilitary training to youngsters near the border with Iraq

A clip recently posted to the Internet appears to show al-Qaeda-affiliated youths being trained to fight against the soldiers of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The video, created by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant — an organization linked to al-Qaeda — and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), shows youth undergoing paramilitary training in the Syrian desert town of Al-Bukamal, near the border with Iraq.

The video shows masked teenagers undergoing weapons training while carrying black Nusra Front banners. The T-shirts they wear read “the Khalifate youth.”

The veracity of the video could not be independently confirmed.

At one point in the clip, the youths sing their praises for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. “Our leader Ayman [Al-Zawahiri] is America’s worst nightmare, with the power of faith and our weapon, the PK machine-gun,” they sing. “We destroyed America with a civilian airplane. The World Trade Center was turned into rubble… If they call me a terrorist, I will consider it an honor. Our terror is blessed, a divine call.”

Earlier in the clip, one youth, holding a hand-grenade, declares: “In the name of Allah… this is a message from us, the youth of the Khalifa in the frontier land of the Levant, to our sheiks, the sheiks of Jihad of the Islamic nation… We continue to the path of Jihad. We will not lay down our weapons before we attain one of two good things: victory or martyrdom. Oh Allah, take of our blood as much as you please.”

Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq Abu-Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared in April that his organization had united with Syria’s Al-Nusra Front under the name “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.”

In the video, which was uploaded on May 25, the teenagers chant praise to Abu-Bakr [Al-Baghdadi] and to al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri.

Last November Human Rights Watch documented the use of children as young as 14 by anti-Assad rebel groups fighting in Syria. In March, Italian photographer Sebastiano Piccolomini photographed a seven-year-old child brandishing an AK-47 in the city of Aleppo.