A digital newspaper that is connected to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist organisation's Yemeni wing, has published an article detailing the US presidential election. Its conclusions, though sometimes jarring, were rather mild and accurate.
The publication, al-Masra, distributed the piece through social media channels last weekend. It was translated by the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors online jihadist activity.
Gazing at the Republican field, al-Qaeda's scribe Adil al-Ahmad spends most of his time on Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner.
Trump "became famous for his anti-Muslim attitude, which threatens to increase the feelings of the Muslims against the United States once he takes over the governance", the article reports, and it goes on to detail Trump's embrace of torture and other heavy-handed tactics, such as targeting the relatives of militants.
It then offers this prediction of what a Hillary Clinton presidency and a Trump one would look like, respectively: "As for the victory of Hillary Clinton, it will be an extension of the policy of Obama and the Democrats in the region, while the victory of Trump will be a drastic change in American policy towards Muslims, since the hostility that Trump bears and the Islamophobia from which he suffers will have a huge impact in the conflict in the Middle East region."
Many commentators have observed how Trump's anti-Muslim demagoguery plays into the hands of extremists, who themselves insist that the West is an enemy of Islam.
The article also notes the murmurings of support for Trump from unlikely corners outside the United States, including Russia. It pointed to how Trump appeared to welcome Russia's military intervention in Syria and championed secular autocrats such as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.