ExtremismAl Qaeda Releases “America Burns” Video, Framing U.S. as Nation in Crisis

Published 28 July 2021

A new propaganda video released by A; Qaeda seeks to portray the United States as weakened, divided, and declining, while Al Qaeda and other extremist groups are positioned as ascendant. This propaganda provides two key pieces of information: first, that Al Qaeda continues to see attacking the U.S. as a critical objective in its overall mission, and, second, the video’s references to lone wolf attacks implies that Al Qaeda may still lack the means to direct sustained attacks within the U.S., and instead hopes one or more individuals take the initiative on their own.

On July 19, 2021, terror group Al Qaeda released a propaganda video entitled “America Burns.” The video, which reprises the content of an article by the same name published in April 2021 in Al Qaeda’s One Ummah magazine, runs just under 15 minutes and is available with both Arabic and English subtitles. This video was uploaded to Filelocker, an online filesharing service frequently utilized by extremists, and shared widely across Al Qaeda media platforms, including its profiles on RocketChat and ChirpWire.

Unlike the original article, which was available only in Arabic and was clearly aimed at a foreign audience, this video is directed at a domestic American audience. It seeks to portray the United States as weakened, divided, and declining, while Al Qaeda and other extremist groups are positioned as ascendant. This propaganda provides two key pieces of information; first, that Al Qaeda continues to see attacking the U.S. as a critical objective in its overall mission, even though much of Al Qaeda’s growing strength comes from its affiliate groups throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Second, the video’s references to lone wolf attacks implies that Al Qaeda may still lack the means to direct sustained attacks within the U.S., and instead hopes one or more individuals take the initiative on their own.  

Like the article, the video uses clips and voiceovers to identify the “five sides of America’s coffin” which it claims will result in the destruction of the nation: the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, a declining economy, political divisions and attacks by Al Qaeda mujahideen. The specificity of the clips demonstrates that Al Qaeda is watching the U.S. closely – United States fiscal policy, for example, gets its own segment — and will latch onto any purported evidence of American decline.

The video makes frequent comparisons between American political crises and those in the Middle East. For example, the narrator refers to Trump as “the American Ghaddafi” and his supporters as the American Daesh (the Arabic acronym for ISIS). The video also compares the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests after George Floyd’s killing to uprisings in Egypt after police beat and killed Khaled Mohammed Saeed, an Egyptian businessman who was said to have evidence of police corruption.