A recently released jihadist video produced by the Saraqeb Media Office features a group that calls itself the "Soldiers of the Omar Farouq Brigade in Syria" and urges Muslims to join the jihad against the army of embattled President Bashir al Assad. The group is named after a senior al Qaeda operative who was killed in Iraq in 2006.
The video, which was obtained and translated by The Long War Journal, is titled "Turkish Mujahideen who are Conducting Jihad in Syria."
A speaker in Turkish exclaims, "O Muslims, o believers, where are you? Let's fight together to save Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan...." The video then shows images of jihadi training camps in Syria, which they say include Turkish fighters, while a Turkish song, "Headed to Damascus," plays in the background.
The video closes with the declaration (spoken in Arabic with Turkish subtitles): "We are soldiers of the Omar Farouq Brigade in Syria... and we raise our voice against Assad's barbaric army. We will live free on these lands! .... God help us!"
Omar Farouq was a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden and senior operative in Southeast Asia, where he set up training camps for al Qaeda-affiliated terror groups and plotted to attack embassies after the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks. He was detained by Indonesian authorities in 2002, transferred to US custody, and held at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. He escaped from Bagram in 2005 along with al Qaeda leaders Abu Yahya al Libi, who is now considered to be al Qaeda's second in command, and Abu Nasir al Qahtani and Abu Abdallah al Shami, two military commanders. Farouq was killed in September 2006 in Basrah, Iraq. He had been sent to Iraq by al Qaeda's leadership cadre to direct al Qaeda in Iraq's operations against US and Coalition forces...