The media arm of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) this week published a nine-page how-to guide in its English-language magazine on making car bombs and suggests terror targets in the UK and the US.

The publication suggests followers target the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Thames House in London and department stores during Friday prayers, so as to avoid harming Muslims.

There is a suggested list of targets for lone-wolf, or individually executed, terror attacks, including New York's Times Square, casinos and nightclubs in Las Vegas, oil tankers and busy train stations.

It also encourages attacks on places around the world where Britons, Americans and Israelis take holidays.

Included in the article is a timeline of terror attacks, including 9/11 and the Boston bombings that includes a blank entry marked 201?, implying a terror attack on foreign soil is planned for the near future.

The manual goes on to praise the “Boston bomber brothers” Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, praying mercy for them.

Steve Stalinsky, whose organization Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) monitors the online and media activity of radical groups and reported on the release of this publication, said, “Both AQAP and ISIL, as well as every other al-Qaeda branch and offshoot is relying on US social media companies including Twitter and YouTube for their cyber-Jihad efforts”.

“There could be some envy by AQAP that ISIL is now getting all the headlines,” Stalinsky said.

Middle East has been witnessing a surge in radical militancy since the US-backed war started in Syria in 2011.

Militant groups which used the opportunity of Western governments’ silence on any activity that could lead into fall of the government in Damascus developed in large numbers across Syria and Iraq.

Mass executions and extremist violence by these groups, mainly the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Levant and al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, has left thousands of victims in both Arab countries.

SHI/SHI