Egyptian Jihadists Cite Zawahiri in Video Claiming Responsibility for Cairo Attack
By Liam Stack and Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Oct. 29, 2013

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 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 that 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 a way 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.” [.....]

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.” [.....]