The video shows the apparently lifeless body of a man on a stretcher. His shirt is pulled up, and a rescuer pumps his chest as if the man’s heart has stopped. The shirt is soaked in blood. Additional footage reveals a deep wound to the top of the man’s head. His face is clearly visible and instantly recognizable — Abu Talha al-Almani, aka Deso Dogg, the much-celebrated German rapper-turned-jihadist. Almani turned up in Syria last summer as a sort of poet-mujahid, singing a cappella (in keeping with Sharia) the praises of jihad against President Bashar al-Assad in the land of al-Sham.
The images of Abu Talha were originally posted in mid-November by the German Islamist website Tauhid-Germany. Emerging two months after Abu Talha was reportedly wounded in an attack by the Syrian air force in rebel-controlled territory in northern Syria, the video quickly sparked reports in both the German and international media that the former rapper was dead. Video has surfaced in the meantime, however, indicating that he is still very much alive.
Those who were quick to count out Abu Talha appear to have overlooked a caption in the Tauhid-Germany video. As if announcing an imminent resurrection, it reads, “Coming Soon: Cowardly Attack, Pointed Response: An Interview with Abu Talha al-Almani.”
Abu Talha was born Denis Cuspert in 1975 in Berlin. In late 2010, he would turn his back on his music career, soon thereafter publicly denouncing the rap lifestyle and reinventing himself as an Islamist preacher by the name of Abu Maleeq. By late 2011, he had hooked up with Mohamed Mahmoud, aka Abu Usama al-Gharib, an Austrian of Egyptian origin. Mahmoud is reputed to be the founder of the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), a jihadist propaganda platform. In 2008, an Austrian court sentenced Mahmoud to four years in prison for terrorism-related offenses. He reportedly left Austria for Berlin shortly after his release in September 2011. He and Cuspert would turn up later that year in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where they together founded the Salafist association Millatu Ibrahim.
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