By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 23, 2020
A chapter about Islamism in Syria I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) ‘World Almanac of Islamism’ was published today. Do check it out, and the broader site, which is a great, accessible resource. The format of the website necessitated that the chapter as I submitted it was edited, condensed, and split up to fill out the various categories. In case it is of any interest, the original version of the chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 4, 2020
A chapter about Al-Qaeda I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) ‘World Almanac of Islamism’ was published today. Do check it out, and the broader site, which is a great, accessible resource. The format of the website necessitated that the chapter as I submitted it was edited, condensed, and split up to fill out the various categories. In case it is of any interest, the original version of the chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 September 2020
Al-Naba 252, page 3
The 252nd edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), was released on 17 September.
Al-Naba 252 contained reports of guerrilla attacks and targeted assassinations at the Centre—against Iraqi security forces and the Iranian proxy militias in the Hashd al-Shabi in Iraq, and against the SDF/PKK in eastern Syria—and the “West African State”, Chad and Niger specifically. IS has been making the Maghreb a primary front since the caliphate collapsed. There was, as ever, the ideological essay on page eleven (of twelve).
The two most notable aspects of Al-Naba 252—expanded on below—were the devotion of the main editorial on page three to an attack on the Taliban for the deal they have made with the Americans over Afghanistan, and IS finally claiming responsibility for the murder of the French aid workers in Niger on 9 August, while continuing its ideological war with Al-Qaeda in Africa. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 11, 2020
In writing a chapter earlier this year about the current status of Al-Qaeda, part of the process was reviewing the organisation’s history since its formation in the late 1980s. What really struck me was how extensively Al-Qaeda is now manipulated, under the influence of, and in places even controlled by state powers. To mark the nineteenth anniversary of 9/11, I thought I could give a brief sketch of this development.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 August 2020
Al-Naba 248
The Islamic State (IS) produced the 248th edition of Al-Naba, its newsletter, on 20 August. The front page was devoted to recent events in Yemen, which had not gone well for IS—although one could easily miss that fact when reading a story that a focuses almost entirely on enemy casualties and the failures of others. IS is, of course, not pleased about the Israeli normalisation of relations with the United Arab Emirates, but Al-Naba makes clear that it is more perturbed that Muslims should believe Turkey or Qatar are any better than the U.A.E., despite their different approach to Islamists. Al-Naba 248 documents IS’s continuing advances in Afghanistan—and, indeed, Iraq, Syria, Africa (the Sahel), and Egypt. There is also a report of insurgent activity in the Philippines. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 August 2020
Al-Naba 246, front page, 6 August 2020
The Islamic State (IS) published the 246th edition of its newsletter, Al-Naba, on 6 August, which highlighted the 2-3 August prison break in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, a massive IS operation lasting twenty-plus hours, and proclaimed that freeing IS jihadists from prisons will now be a priority for the group. In 2012, shortly after the American withdrawal from Iraq, IS announced Operation BREAKING THE WALLS, which went on for a year, breaking open Iraqi prisons. The narrative of the IS’s “defeat” by the Surge and Awakening of 2007-08 is problematic in some of its fundamentals, but among the reasons it proved to be so fleeting in practice was this prison-break campaign that restored to the battlefield key IS operatives who planned the caliphate project in 2014. It is, therefore, alarming to see the arrival of such a campaign in Afghanistan at the moment the U.S. is headed, heedlessly, for the exit. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 August 2020
Conrad of Montferrat … imagined. Picture is from the Paris of the 1840s, by François-Édouard Picot.
Conrad of Montferrat, the monarch of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the four Crusader principalities, was assassinated in Tyre on 28 April 1192 by the Nizari Ismailis, the legendary Assassins. The event received a lot of interest in its own time and since in the Christian world—and fuelled the various myths about the Nizaris either being focused on the Crusaders (the Nizaris’ war was always with the Sunni order) or operating in Europe (which they never did). There has also long been speculation about a third party having sponsored the Nizaris, and a paper by Patrick A. Williams examines this issue. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 July 2020
The Witch (2016) is set in the Plymouth Colony, what is now the U.S. state of Massachusetts, in the 1630s. The focus is on Puritanism and the witch craze, subjects that are not entirely irrelevant at the present time. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2020
Al-Qaeda’s General Command released a statement on 29 June 2020 through its As-Sahab Media, entitled, “A Message For The Oppressed Masses In The West”, which seeks to capitalise on the recent unrest in the United States by offering Islam as the solution to racial divisions. Al-Qaeda, of course, diagnoses the root cause of America’s problems in its greed “Jewish overlords”, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is common to most jihadists. The text of this message is reproduced below. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 June 2020
Al-Naba 239, page 9
The Islamic State (IS) released the 239th edition of its newsletter, Al-Naba, on 18 June. Pages 9 and 10 of this twelve-page document were given over to a profile of Abu Khaled al-Hindi, the jihadist elsewhere named as Mohammad Sajid Kuthirummal who massacred twenty-five worshippers at a Sikh gurdwara or temple in Kabul three months ago, on 25 March 2020, during an hours-long siege. The details of Abu Khaled’s life—finding IS after being repelled by “nationalist” jihadist groups, fighting while injured, his obedience to IS’s leaders, and thirst for “martyrdom”—are relatively standard hagiography from IS. What is really worth noting is that such an extensive focus on him, and through him on Afghanistan, underlines the importance IS has placed on its Afghan branch, Wilayat Khorasan. Continue reading
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