Richard Spencer in Dubai
Published: 4:38PM BST 01 Jul 2010

Its tag-line is "Inspire the Believers" and its first front page features a quotation by the radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki: "May our souls be sacrificed for you".

The magazine claims to be published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), whose leaders are the most prominent propagandists of any of the group's branches.

The full magazine is not yet online, but the contents page offers messages from both Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It also advertises a piece by Awlaki entitled: "Shaykh Anwar's message to the American people and Muslims in the West".

Other articles include a question-and-answer session with the leader of AQAP, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Basir, and a tantalising piece offering a "detailed yet short, easy-to-read manual on how to make a bomb using ingredients found in a kitchen".

It says the title comes from a Koranic verse "Inspire the believers to fight". "It is jihad that gives this nation life," its Letter from the Editor states. "We survive through jihad and perish without it."

Among the AQAP are several former inmates of the Guantánamo Bay internment camp who defected back to the organisation after going through a rehabilitation programme run by counter-terrorism officials in Saudi Arabia.

They later accused the programme of trying to brainwash them, and are now determined to use the same "soft propaganda" methods on potential recruits, issuing repeated videos explaining their ideology.

Awlaki, whose father is a former minister of agriculture in Yemen and who grew up in the United States when his father was studying there, has become the most important tool in al-Qaeda's outreach to English-speaking Muslims.

His videos have been widely circulated on British campuses, and he was in touch with the American army major who went on a shooting rampage last November in Fort Hood, Texas. He is now believed to be operating under the shelter of members of his powerful Awlaki clan in eastern Yemen with ties to the militant group, and this magazine may be his brainchild, according to analysts.

The magazine was first discovered online by SITE, an internet-based monitoring service that highlights jihadist propaganda online. It said that apart from the contents pages, all the remainder of the 67 pages appeared to have failed to load properly.

While Awlaki's family have denied that he is an active terrorist, American officials say he plays an active role in recruiting for al-Qaeda, and have placed him on a list of potential targets for "kill or capture".

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, this week said Awlaki was now thought to have had a direct operational role in the alleged plot to bring down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, for which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former student of University College, London, is now awaiting trial.

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Any self-respecting Intelligence Agency that fails to hack this Al-Qaeda site and add or change a step or two in the article about how to "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom", does not deserve to exist.