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Earlier this week, the AP’s Rukmini Callimachi revealed one of the memos she discovered in the sixth trashbag full of AQIM documents she collected in the aftermath of the French attack on jihadis in Timbuktu in January. The memo, dated October 2012, is from the shura council of AQIM to the shura council of the Masked Brigade, a subsidiary of AQIM at the time. Until October 2012, the Masked Brigade had been run by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the most infamous jihadi in Africa. We previously knew that AQIM leadership had removed Belmokhtar from his position in that month, afterwhich he established his own group, the Blood Signers left to run the Masked Brigade as a separate organization. But we did not specifically know why AQIM had taken its decision until now. The memo is AQIM’s response to a letter sent by the Masked Brigade that criticized AQIM leadership and recommened a course correction. For

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Will McCants May 31, 2013

Usama bin Laden Called Yunus Khalis “the Father Sheikh:” Weird But Possibly True

Many authors have tried to fill in the gaps in the historical account of how al-Qa’ida’s central leadership came to reside in Jalalabad for part of 1996, with mixed results. Yunus Khalis has become a fixture in these narratives largely because he was the best known person that Bin Laden interacted with in the summer after al-Qa’ida’s leadership fled Sudan for Nangarhar. For many authors, Khalis’s fame and prominence in the region combined with his known interactions with Bin Laden provide an adequate explanation: al-Qa’ida must have come to Nangarhar in 1996 because of the importance of the Khalis-Bin Laden relationship. This is, of course, a vast oversimplification, and I hope that the report I recently published for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center will go some way towards exposing the most obviously untenable parts of this narrative. But as part of the research for this monograph, I have also found

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Kevin May 21, 2013

Jihadi Twitter Activism part 2: Jabhat al-Nusra on the Twittersphere

For the second installment of our Jihadi Twitter Activism series Ali Fisher and Nico Prucha explore data collected from Twitter related to the Syrian AQ branch Jabhat al-Nusra. This post identifies key ‘influence multipliers’ for Jabhat al-Nusra’s strategic communication and an overview of the content that these multipliers disseminate via Twitter.

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Nico Prucha May 13, 2013

Yunus Khalis’s Poem to a (Very) Young Wife: “I Am a Simple Man…”

Western authors commenting on various mujahidin leaders involved with Usama bin Laden often seem to go out of their way to make the individuals in question seem extra villainous. This has been especially clear in the case of Yunus Khalis. In English works on al-Qa’ida, we learn little about Khalis except that he a) helped to host Bin Laden in Jalalabad in 1996, and b) he apparently married a much younger woman when he was already an old man. There is disagreement about her age, but estimates range from 14-18 or so, with several homing in on the age of 17 years.

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Kevin May 9, 2013

Jabhat al-Nusra: A Self-Professed AQ Affiliate

[Jihadica is pleased to welcome a guest post from Charles Lister (Charles_Lister), a London-based terrorism and insurgency analyst. The views expressed below are entirely his own and do not represent those of his employer.] An article recently released by EA Worldview claims to refute the widespread belief that Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) is an al-Qaeda affiliate; rather, it is a “local faction” in the Syrian insurgency that respects al-Qaeda but maintains its autonomy. According to EA Worldview, when JN’s leader, al-Golani, recently renewed his oath of allegiance (bay`a) to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri on April 10th, it was merely a formal nod of respect without significance for command and control. EA Worldview’s interpretation of Golani’s oath of allegiance is wrong & here’s why:

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Will McCants May 8, 2013

The Jihad of Images – al-Qaeda’s Prophecy of Martyrdom

Asiem El Difraoui, a senior political scientist and an award winning documentary filmmaker, has recently published a new book on the subject of Jihad videos as the most important propaganda phenomenon. He currently is a senior fellow at Institute for Media- and Communication Policies in Germany. In his book, The Jihad of Images – al-Qaeda’s Prophecy of Martyrdom, Asiem analyses the visual communication strategy of contemporary jihadism along the iconography and overall narrative jihadists have successfully promoted in the recent years.  Asiem has been engaged in studying jihadists and their propaganda for several years and is a regular member at conferences (here and here). Out of the range of Asiem’s recent publications, his study jihad.de is of particular interest (in German, click here). Here is the English book description by the publisher (for French, click here): “Without the creation of a highly complex propaganda strategy with videos as its most

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Nico Prucha May 2, 2013

Al-Qaradawi and the Help of the Unbelievers

  Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the famous Egyptian Muslim scholar who’s often described as the most influential Sunni scholar alive, is well known for his comments on politics, society and other practical issues that believers have to deal with. Yesterday, I read in an article that he has added a new comment of that type to an already long list: he has called upon the United States to “hit” Syria. This may not come as a surprise to some, but it is nevertheless a position that is worth taking a closer look at. “Please sir, I want some more” In a recent Friday sermon delivered in the Qatari capital Doha, al-Qaradawi thanked the United States for giving 60 million dollars’ worth of weapons to the Syrian rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Asad. This is remarkable enough in itself, but al-Qaradawi even added to that by asking for more help from

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Joas Wagemakers May 1, 2013
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