Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has made his first appearance in a recruiting video for a major al Qaeda-affiliated terror group.
al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s Somalia-based affiliate, has released a 51 minute propaganda video which weaves together video of Trump and Anwar al-Awlaki, the one-time top al Qaeda recruiter and US citizen who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011.
The video is the second in a series of two Shabab recruitment videos highlighting American born jihadis fighting for the group in Somalia, according to the terrorist monitoring group SITE. The video features archival clips of Awlaki castigating the West and predicting that the United States will eventually turn on its Muslim population. This is followed by video of Trump’s December 7th rally in South Carolina, where he called for his now-notorious Muslim immigrant ban.
At the December 19th Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said Trump’s calls for a ban on Muslim immigrants had made him ISIS’s “best recruiter.”
