A new video has emerged of a man alleged to be Australia's first known suicide bomber.
The video depicts a man standing on the back of truck believed to have been used in an attack against an army checkpoint in north-eastern Syria in September this year.
It appears the video was posted by the Al Qaeda-linked group Jabhat al Nusrah, who in a previous posting apparently referred to the same man as ‘Abu Asma al Australi’.
The bomber is thought to be a man named Ahmed, from Brisbane, the ABC reports, but because the man's face is obscured in the video it is not possible to confirm his identity.
A spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police has confirmed there has been a “significant rise” in the number of Australians joining extremist groups in Syria, with the number rising from just a handful to as many as two dozen in a year.
Insurgency analyst Will Plowright, from the University of Melbourne, says though it’s difficult to tell how many foreign fighters there are in Syria, the number is likely to be in the hundreds or even thousands, with many coming from Middle Eastern countries and Western Europe.
"Having foreign fighters makes [groups such as Jabhat al Nusrah] feel like they’re representing an international struggle," he says.
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