Zawahiri video claims says Shehab joined Qaeda

"I will break the good news to our Islamic nation, which will... annoy the crusaders, and it is that the Shebab movement in Somalia has joined Al-Qaeda," the network s chief Ayman al-Zawahiri said. "The jihadist movement is with the grace of Allah, growing and spreading within its Muslim nation despite facing the fiercest crusade campaign in history by the West," said Zawahiri in the video released by Al-Qaeda s media arm As-Sahab. In the first part of the video, Shebab s leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubair, addressed Zawahiri, saying: "We will move along with you as faithful soldiers." "In the name of my mujahedeen brothers, leaders and soldiers... I pledge obedience," Zubair said. "Lead us on the road of jihad and martyrdom, in the footsteps that our martyr Osama bin Laden had drawn for us," he added, referring to Al-Qaeda s former leader who was killed last year in a covert US raid on his hide-out in Pakistan. "Our brothers in the Shebab al-Mujahedeen, were the rock... that stood in the face of the joint American-Ethiopian-Kenyan-crusade attack on Islam and Muslims in Somalia," said Zawahiri. On January 24, a Shebab suicide bomber blew himself at an Ethiopian army base in the central Somali town of Beledweyne. Hardline Shebab officials said 33 Ethiopians were killed in the blast in Beledweyne, a town about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Ethiopian border, but the claims could not be verified.