ji·had·ica

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

Primer on Jihadi Players in Algeria and Mali, Pt. 2: Belmokhtar & Those Who Sign with Blood

The man allegedly behind the gas facility attack, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had, until recently, run AQIM’s Katibat al-Moulathimin (“The Veiled Brigade”), a reference to the practice of male veiling common in parts of the Sahel.  In October 2012 AQIM stated that Belmokhtar had been “suspended” from the command of the group, owing to Belmokhtar’s supposed deviations from the goals of the group’s leadership. Belmokhtar was purportedly at loggerheads with three AQIM leaders: AQIM’s amir Droukdel, the recently-appointed Saharan emir Yahya Abou el-Hammam, and Katibat Tariq Ibn Ziad commander Abou Zeid. Belmokhtar’s spokesman denied the removal but in December Belmokhtar appeared on video for the first time to announce his departure* from AQIM and his creation of a new group, al-Mouwakoune Bi-Dima (“Those Who Sign with Blood”), a reference to the name of the GIA detachment responsible for the 1994 hijacking of an Air France flight. In his video, Belmokhtar said his

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Andrew Lebovich January 20, 2013

Fatwa on the Permissibility of Killing an Ambassador

I have to admit that it makes me feel rather uneasy choosing a title like this and writing a post about last week’s death of four staff members of the American embassy in Libya, including the ambassador himself, Christopher Stevens. Yesterday, however, a fatwa was published on the permissibility of killing ambassadors that I think Jihadica readers should know about. Three questions The fatwa, published by Abu l-Mundhir al-Shinqiti, is in response to three different questions by three different people. The first question deals with the permissibility of killing an ambassador who doesn’t approve of insults against Islam and has a positive attitude towards Muslims. For those readers thinking this is a direct reference to ambassador Stevens, who was apparently known for his affection for the Libyan people, think again. The person asking the question adds that he’s not talking about the American ambassador since “targeting American embassies in all

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Joas Wagemakers September 21, 2012

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

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Will McCants September 14, 2012

Al-Qaida Advises the Arab Spring: Abu Basir’s Scrapbook

In my previous posts on al-Qaida scholars advising the Arab Spring (here, here, here and here), we have frequently come across the Syrian-British Abu Basir al-Tartusi. His advice to the people of the Arab world trying to overthrow their dictators has often been at odds with that of his fellow radical ideologues, as we have seen, since Abu Basir frequently encourages fighters to be lenient with others or even scolds them for using violent methods too recklessly. As we saw in my previous post on Yemen, other scholars have criticised Abu Basir for this. Similarly, when Abu Basir published a fatwa on his website in February in which he expressed support for the (non-Islamist) Free Syrian Army fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad and not for the much more overtly Islamic Jabhat Nusrat al-Sham, he was criticised for this by Abu l-Mundhir al-Shinqiti on the Shari’a Forum

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Joas Wagemakers July 28, 2012

Al-Qaida advises the Arab Spring: Libya

Unlike the Arab uprising in Syria, which was the subject of my previous post, the one in Libya seems to have reached its end. The regime has been overthrown and Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi and some of his sons are dead. Although it is by no means certain that Libya is on its way to becoming a fully-fledged liberal democracy, the Libyan people have achieved things that most Syrians can still only dream of. In this post, I will look at how some scholars and ideologues associated with al-Qaida responded to the situation in Libya. The West One member of al-Qaida Central who responds to the situation in Libya is, perhaps unsurprisingly since he is a Libyan himself, Abu Yahya al-Libi. His comments stress that the United States is “the idol (taghut) of the age” (i.e., the country that other countries “serve”) and “the source of terrorism”. He asks rhetorically: “Isn’t America the one

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Joas Wagemakers January 9, 2012

Sayf al-‘Adl and al-Qa’ida’s Historical Leadership

In light of the widely reported news that Sayf al-‘Adl (also spelled Saif al-Adel) has taken the reins of operational leadership within al-Qa’ida in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, I thought it would be useful to Jihadica’s readers to provide a bit of context about this man and about the significance, if any, of these reports (see, e.g., Musharbash and Bergen), all of which rely on the testimony of Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. First of all, it would be more correct to say that Sayf al-‘Adl remains the operational leader of al-Qa’ida rather than that he has lately assumed this rank. (Nor is this the first time that Benotman has called attention in the press to Sayf’s operational re-emergence in al-Qa’ida. He discussed Sayf’s release from Iran and return to headquarters, as it were, with Der Speigel last October)

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Vahid Brown May 18, 2011

Fizazi Joining Recantation Club?

Der Spiegel reports that the imprisoned Moroccan scholar Muhammad Fizazi has issued a letter to Muslims in Germany declaring Germany “not a battle zone”. The letter, which was allegedly issued on 21 July, has not yet been made public. Without knowing the precise content, it is difficult to assess its importance. We don’t know whether he is discouraging operations in Germany only, in Europe more broadly, or renouncing violence altogether. But Fizazi is one of the most influential ideologues in the European/North African jihadi sphere, so this could be quite significant. Of course, all the caveats of recantations from prison apply. Moreover, as I have said before, no individual recantation is going to end jihadism, but a critical mass of such declarations will have an influence. In any case, Berlin must be relieved. After the latest barrage of anti-German al-Qaida statements, here is finally a jihadi with nice things to

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Thomas Hegghammer October 26, 2009

Will AQIM Aim North or South?

It appears that this year’s Ramadan was one of the least violent in the nearly two decades of jihadi activism in Algeria. While this period is hailed by militants and their leaders as the most propitious one for jihadi attacks, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was not able to wage a major operation. The threat is still vibrant in the organization’s mountainous strongholds east of Algiers, but AQIM’s ability to strike the capital has been significantly reduced. (By contrast, the relative calm of Ramadan in 2007 was followed by the combined suicide attack against the UN headquarters and the Constitutional Court in Algiers, on December 11). This evolution fits the general trend, documented by Hanna Rogan (see also Thomas’s post on April 3), about the decreasing violent record of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), the Algerian jihadi organization that turned into AQIM in January 2007. Going

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Jean-Pierre Filiu September 30, 2009

A First Look at the LIFG Revisions

(Editor’s note: This piece is a sneak preview of our second guest blogger: Vahid Brown from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He will not start writing regularly until October, and I will present him more formally then, but he has already written this important piece, which for obvious reasons cannot wait.) I have just looked at the first three installments of the LIFG Revisions posted to the internet, and though these initial releases amount to less than ten percent of the work, we can already see that this is a very sweeping repudiation not just of salafi jihadism but of all forms of revolutionary Islamism in general. The text is remarkably broad in its scope, and strikes me as a 21st-century Sahwist renewal of the 1970s-era Muslim Brotherhood rejection of Qutbist Islamism. Indeed, the phrase in the last sentence of the excerpt below, about the authors being “preachers

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Vahid Brown September 14, 2009
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