WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri has called upon people in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to rise up against their rulers.

In a video posted on the internet, the Al-Qaeda chief has urged Saudis to follow the example of the Arab Spring that toppled regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and rise up against the oil-rich kingdom's ruling al-Saud family.

He has also asked the Yemeni people to rise up against the country's new president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, portraying him as the stooge of the unpopular former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the US.

In a six-minute video that appeared Thursday on jihadist websites, Zawahiri referring to the Arab Spring said: "It has been nearly a year now since the Arab peoples rose against their rulers. They rose in the west and north, and you don't move."

The Egyptian-born Zawahiri, appealing to the Saudi people, said: "My noble brothers, why are you patient with the rule of the family of Saud, while it is one of the worse regimes in terms of corruption?"

He reproached the Saudi rulers for having allowed the US troops to enter the country.

"Why don't you rise while you are the sons of the proud and strong tribes that look down upon death in order to lift the humiliation and the oppression?" Zawahiri asked in the video translated by the US-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamist extremism.

In another video, Zawahiri accuses Yemen's President Hadi of being an extension of the Saleh regime.

"All the corrupt agreed to be united under the U.S. banner in order to fight the mujahedeen using Saudi money," he said. He urges Yemeni youth to fight the new president, the US and Yemen's Shiite Muslims, who the outfit views as heretics.

Zawahiri became Al-Qaeda's chief after the terror outfit's founder Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEAL commandos in a midnight raid on his hideout in Pakistan last May.