25th Anniversary of 9/11: Osama's son appears in Al-Qaeda video despite 2019 death report

A stark, cracked mud wall, a traditional white turban, and an assault rifle leaning close by — Al-Qaeda’s media machinery resurrects an ghost from its past to mark a quarter-century since the September 11 terror attacks.

In a 50-minute propaganda video titled “A Quarter Century of the 11 September Raids,” released by the terror group’s media wing As-Sahab, unseen footage of Hamza bin Laden has emerged. Hamza, the son and designated heir of Osama bin Laden, was reportedly killed in a US counterterrorism operation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 2019. Yet, years after Washington claimed his death, Al-Qaeda has deployed his image to project continuity and ignite fresh recruitment.

The release coincides with the 25th anniversary of the 2001 attacks, offering intelligence analysts a rare look into the group's ongoing narrative strategy. Intriguingly, the video opens not with a international strike, but with historical footage from the September 2014 assault on the Karachi naval dockyard by Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

Visually, the production relies heavily on ideological nostalgia. Hamza appears multiple times throughout the runtime, positioned in a manner explicitly tailored to evoke early global jihadism. The video also incorporates previously unseen imagery of former Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who was killed in a 2022 US drone strike in Kabul.

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Despite US assertions of Hamza’s death — which Washington had placed a $1 million bounty on in early 2019 prior to reporting his elimination — Al-Qaeda has never officially acknowledged his passing or published a customary funeral eulogy.

Intelligence officials believe the strategic deployment of the Bin Laden lineage is designed to reinforce the ideological doctrine of current chief Saif al-Adl, leveraging the family name to draw in a new generation of recruits.