A still from the video produced by al-Kataib Media. A still from the video produced by al-Kataib Media.

The slickly-produced video promises the vacation of a lifetime — going up an equatorial river in a rowboat, camping by a jungle lake, and a chance to shoot giraffes and Cape buffaloes. It’s the kind of big-game holiday that has long outraged environmentalists, and for which bored oil millionaires are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars.

Except, this trip costs nothing.

“You eat, drink and hunt for free,” the video quotes jihadist patriarch Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden’s mentor, as saying. “Not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, or paying $500 a night at a London hotel. It is an entertaining journey of tourism and hunting. Indeed, the tourism of my nation is jihad.”

Produced by al-Kataib Media, the propaganda wing of Somalia’s al-Qaeda wing, Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen, the video seems intended to draw the kind of adventure-seeking youth who have swelled the Islamic State’s ranks in recent years.

“Here you do not need a permit to hunt these animals,” an al-Shabab insurgent says in the video. “In the land of Islam, these animals are free. Praise be to God, there is no shortage of meat here.” Another adds, “Today, we will feast on delicious meat.”

“The mujahideen is close to nature,” the video quotes slain United States-origin jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki as saying. “He eats different food from around the world.”

In the video, recruits — at least one of them appears to be of Western origin — swim in a jungle lake, row through tropical rivers, and train on Indian Ocean beaches.

“My dear brothers, do not be deceived into believing that when people fight jihad, they are accompanied by hunger. Just look at this meat here! So what are you waiting for?” says a masked insurgent in the video.

In passing, he adds: “We send our condolences to the widows of our martyred Sheikhs, and other Muslim brothers, who were killed by the Kenyan government” — a reference to the military campaign against Somalian jihadists that has pushed them out of their stronghold in Mogadishu. “Let them know that we are now in Kenya, and that we will take revenge on their behalf.”

Evicted from Mogadishu by African Union troops in a campaign spearheaded by Kenya, al-Shabaab has staged a series of attacks. The latest was a strike on the al-Sahafi hotel in Mogadishu on Sunday, which claimed at least 15 lives, including that of a Somali General and a Member of Parliament.

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