NAIROBI : Republican White House frontrunner Donald Trump’s call for a ‘shutdown’ on Muslims entering the US have been used by Somalia’s Shebab in a jihadist recruitment video, a US group that monitors extremist propaganda said Saturday.
The Al Qaeda-affiliated Shebab use an excerpt from Trump’s December 7 speech calling for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the US to try woo Muslims in the West to wage jihad, the SITE Intelligence Group reported.
In the speech Trump proposed barring Muslims from entering the US until the US was “able to determine and understand this problem” of Islamist violence, following the killing of 14 people by a radicalised couple in California. In the Shebab video, the Trump soundbite is preceded by a speech by US-born radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki calling on Muslims in America to “flee the oppressive Western atmosphere for the lands of Islam.
Al-Awlaki, who Washington alleges was a senior Al Qaeda operative, was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. The Shebab video was uploaded onto Twitter by the Al-Kataib Media Foundation, a regular conduit for the group’s propaganda material, SITE said. The Shebab was born out of the Islamic Court Union, which controlled central and southern Somalia for six months in 2006, including the capital Mogadishu. The insurgents, who were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011, are fighting to overthrow Somalia’s internationally-backed government, which is protected by 22,000 African Union troops.