ji·had·ica

Apocalypse Delayed

Today, Turkish-backed rebels took another small town in their relentless march to secure northern Syria from ISIS and the Kurds. The news of Dabiq’s fall would be unremarkable—the final battle lasted hours and the casualties were low—but for the fact that ISIS spent the last two years proclaiming the town to be the site of an End-of-Days showdown with the infidels. This isn’t quite what the group had in mind. ISIS’ spirit animal, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, first signaled the importance of Dabiq a decade ago when he cited an ancient Islamic prophecy about a meadow outside the town. There, Muslims would fight a “great battle” against the infidels (a separate prophecy says they would number eighty nations, each ten thousand strong). Although two-thirds of the Muslims would flee or die, the remainder would go on to conquer the eastern Roman capital of Constantinople. Zarqawi proclaimed that the fire he had

Read More »

ISIS and Israel

[Jihadica is pleased to welcome Dana Hadra. You can find her on Twitter @dhadra20. -ed.]   On October 23, 2015, ISIS released its first video in Hebrew addressing “the Jews occupying Muslim lands.” “Not one Jew will remain in Jerusalem,” a masked ISIS member warns. “Do what you want in the meantime, but then we will make you pay ten times over.” This video is the latest in a string of statements made by ISIS threatening to invade Israel and slaughter its citizens. Does ISIS’s rhetoric match its strategic reality? Does it really have its sights set on Israel? To be sure, Israel has seen an uptick in ISIS activity along its southern border in recent months. In July 2015 ISIS’s Egyptian affiliate “Wilayat Sinai” claimed responsibility for three rockets that exploded in southern Israel. The Gaza-based jihadist organization Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade, which might have ties to ISIS, launched

Read More »

Why Is ISIS So Bad?

Why is ISIS bad? It’s a basic question that I encounter a lot, along with the related question, why is ISIS so evil? Good and evil are value judgments, so everyone will have a different opinion about what deserves the labels. But we can at least say that ISIS (aka the Islamic State) is out of step with mainstream morality in most Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Still, that begs the question: why is ISIS so bad relative to mainstream culture? The answer lies in ISIS’s needs and desires. ISIS wants to revive parts of Islamic scripture written in the early Middle Ages. Perhaps those parts reflected mainstream morality then but they’re out of step with today’s mainstream. ISIS wants to terrify the local population to subdue it. As you’ll see in my book, ISIS could govern and fight differently but it doesn’t think the alternatives are effective. ISIS needs to

Read More »

Baghdadi’s Family Tree

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State and self-proclaimed caliph, claims to be a descendant of Muhammad. That’s not surprising since most Sunni Muslims believe only a descendant from Muhammad’s tribe can be caliph. What makes Baghdadi’s lineage interesting is that he claims to descend from Muhammad through ten of the twelve Shi`i imams. That’s an unusual and sadly ironic genealogy for a man hellbent on eradicating the Shia. I mention Baghdadi’s genealogy in passing in my profile of him but you can read a fuller discussion of it in my forthcoming book, ISIS Apocalypse. There you’ll learn about the apocalyptic prophecies that his pedigree supposedly fulfills.

Read More »

New Abbottabad Documents

In the course of the Abid Naseer trial, the U.S.  Department of Justice released several documents recovered from the raid on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. As I did with the Abbottabad documents released to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, I have cataloged the new documents and created a handlist with links to translations and originals. The reference numbers in brackets are keyed to the original Arabic texts to avoid confusion. In the course of preparing the handlist, I noticed that two of the translations were attached to the wrong documents (translations of 424 and 432 were switched). I also saw that item 404 is actually three separate letters, none of which is translated (I split the document into three labeled a, b, c). If anyone wants to type up the documents and translate them, I’ll post your work here. Of the authors and recipients, Sultan al-`Abdali “Qattal” al-Jadawi is unknown

Read More »

Office Space

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

Read More »

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:

Read More »

Attacking Oil Installations

To give some ideological context for the jihadi hostage-taking at the Algerian gas facility, readers might be interested in two jihadi documents on the permissibility and advisability of attacking oil installations. Such attacks are not universally popular in jihadi circles–even Bin Laden vacillated on this point–because they harm the local economy, which alienates the Muslim public. But some jihadis have argued that there are upsides as well. One such jihadi is `Abd Allah b. Nasir al-Rashid, who wrote a fatwa explaining the benefits of attacking oil installations:  It harms the infidels’ economy by raising oil prices. Although this rise in oil prices is good for apostate Arab countries that produce oil, the rise in prices makes the infidels dislike those countries more. States and companies have to dedicate more resources to protecting oil infrastructure. Another is Abu Bakr Naji, who offers the following in his Management of Savagery: Attacking an oil installation causes the local government

Read More »

Shabab and al-Qaeda Infighting (or Game of Thrones, Somali Style)

The most high-profile foreign fighter in Shabab, Omar Hammami, published two documents online yesterday detailing splits among Shabab’s leaders. Clint Watts has the scoop. Last night, I helped Clint read through the longer of the two Arabic documents and here were some things that struck me: Global vs. Local: Hammami uses “Ansar” (“Helpers”) for Somali jihadis and “Muhajirun” (“Emigrants”) for foreign fighters, which hearkens back to the distinction between Ansar and Muhajirs in Medina. The Ansar are divided between those who support the global jihad of al-Qaeda and those with a more local focus. He portrays the Muhajirs in Somalia as uniformly “globalist.” Oath of Allegience: On the one hand, Hammami claims that Godane, the current leader of the Shabab and the architect of its merger with al-Qaeda, has a lofty view of al-Qaeda:  “[Godane] said that an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda is tantamount to an oath of allegiance to the

Read More »

US Embassy Protests

Update 9/21/2012: Here’s a Foreign Affairs essay I wrote about the roll of Salafis in the riots. Below are some thoughts I shared with a friend this morning who asked about the protests. I had to edit one pretty heavily in light of the events of the past few hours, and I’m sure I’ll have to revise them again in the coming weeks given how confusing everything is right now. If I’ve made any egregious errors in well-established facts, please let me know here or on twitter and I’ll update it. 1.     Who’s behind the film? A Coptic Christian living in California who claimed to be an Israeli-American. Other Coptic Christians living in the US promoted the film on their Arabic websites and also enlisted the support of Terry Jones (ie Qur’an burner). 2.     How did the film get to the Arab world? An Egyptian channel supervised by a Salafi cleric (Muhammad al-Zughbi) was the

Read More »
Latest Jihadica
Subscribe