After months of silence, a video released from al-Qaeda on Monday announced that the struggling organization will close 150 terror cells worldwide, including in Seattle.
The unnamed spokesman in the grainy video cited skyrocketing insurance costs as the primary reason for closing the Seattle cell. “Health, dental, vision, life, automobile, home… it adds up fast,” said the figure.
Most of the local terror cell jobs will be outsourced to Iraq and Pakistan. The move has upset local dedicated al-Qaeda operatives.
“I left my job at Microsoft because I believed in this organization’s three values: Death to America, establish caliphate, and taking care of the martyrs with full vision and dental,” said Shoreline al-Qaeda member Ahmed Moqed. “But Death to Pakistan, and I have to pay my family’s premiums out of pocket? This is not what al-Qaeda stands for.”
Although current al-Qaeda operatives in the affected cities will be offered the option of transferring with their jobs, al-Qaeda officials expect fewer than 10% of eligible members to pursue this choice.
“I don’t hate America’s freedom,” said Fazul al-Masri, a soon to be unemployed explosives technician. “But I do hate this enormous pile of bills I get just from a single visit to the doctor,” he said, motioning to a stack of no fewer than 50 envelopes on his desk.
The figure in the al-Qaeda video stressed that the move should not be taken as a sign of weakness, but of strength and resolve. The organization believes that by consolidating its resources it will be more effective in its battle against the great satan. “We realized that pouring such a large amount of our funding straight from rich Saudi pockets to rich American insurance companies was somewhat counter-productive,” he said.
The news comes at a difficult time for al-Qaeda members across the United States, as a struggling economy and rising gas prices are already putting pressure on family budgets. The shadowy figure in the video emphasized that al-Qaeda understands the challenges, but everyone is making sacrifices. The terrorist mouthpiece explained: “Jihad isn’t free you know.”
Story Tip: Dylan Wilbanks [1] of Seattle Metblogs [2] – Thanks, Dylan!