Al-Qaeda's Yemen branch claims responsibility for Charlie Hebdo attack. Yahoo/Reuters

Nassar bin Ali al-Ansi, the leader of Al-Qaeda's Yemen branch, takes responsibility for the attack. Yahoo/Reuters.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has taken credit for the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Yahoo/Reuters. The leader of the Yemen based group, Nassar bin Ali al-Ansi, took responsibility in a video released on Youtube. The attacks in Paris had killed 17 people over three days. Al-Ansi also claimed that Ayman al-Zawarhi, the leader of Al-Qaeda, gave the go ahead for the mission as well. Al-Ansi mocked the massive rallies in defiance of the attacks calling them a display of weakness. Two of the perpetrators of the attack, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, may have met with another high ranking Al-Qaeda official, Anwar al-Awlaki, who may have financed the attack before his death in 2011 in Yemen.  

My Comment:

Reuters says that they haven't been able to verify the video, but I'd put money on it being real. However, I am not 100% sure that they are the ones responsible. I have heard other reports of the third man involved in these attacks, Amedy Coulibaly, the hostage taker that was, at the very least, in contact with the Kouachi brothers, was a supporter of ISIS. That makes very little sense because Al-Qaeda and ISIS are fierce rivals, to the point that they actually fight each other in Syria. 

It is possible that Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers were able to put aside their organizations strife and work together in a joint operation, but if that was the case I don't see the higher ups in either Al-Qaeda or ISIS approving of it. At least I hope not. Nobody wants Al-Qaeda and ISIS to form a working relationship. ISIS has the money and the bodies while Al-Qaeda has the experience in running overseas terror operations. That is a bad combination. 

All confusion aside, this is still a radical Islamic terrorist attack no matter what. I have very little reason to believe that AQAP was not involved in some way in this attack. I have more reason to believe that ISIS was only tangentially connected to it. It could be possible that AQAP is just taking credit for an ISIS operation, but that seems very unlikely. Of course, no matter who did it, the attack was a huge victory for Jihadist terrorists everywhere.