LISTEN: Osama bin Laden’s Son Urges Jihadists to Go to Syria

Undated file picture of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

In a new audio message purportedly released by Hamza bin Laden, son of deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Hamza urges all “mujahideen” to travel to Syria to fight. Hamza was groomed by his father to be the heir of the bin Laden brand of terrorism.

The video is titled “Jerusalem Is a Bride and Our Blood Is Her Dowery.” And while Hamza urges terrorists to flood Syria, the goal is the capture of Jerusalem from Israel. The audio message was released around the same time that the Islamic State released a series of video messages directed at the capture of Jerusalem.

Though their end goals are the same, ISIS and al-Qaeda have been at war with each other since September 2015, when al-Zawahiri, the man who replaced Osama bin Laden as the head of al-Qaeda, declared war on ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an audio message. al-Zawahiri said:

“We [al-Qaeda] don’t recognize this caliphate… Despite the big mistakes [of ISIS], if I were in Iraq or Syria I would cooperate with them in killing the crusaders and secularists and Shia even though I don’t recognize the legitimacy of their state, because the matter is bigger than that.”

Along with the al-Zawahiri’s statement, al-Qaeda also perpetuated a blitz propaganda campaign in November 2015 calling ISIS “un-jihadi.” Watch those videos here.

ISIS arose out of al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI. According to Yahoo! News:

[ISIS] split from al-Qaeda during the early phases of the Syrian civil war that erupted in 2011, after refusing to confine its operations to Syria. [ISIS] has since seized large swaths of Syria and Iraq, eclipsing al-Qaeda as the world’s chief jihadist threat, with [ISIS] chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declaring himself Caliph or leader of all Muslims in 2014.