By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 September 2022
Christian homes burned by the Islamic State in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo || Al-Naba 352, p. 5
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 October 2018
Al-Naba 150
The 150th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) weekly newsletter, was published on 4 October. IS focused on the progress of its guerrilla campaign in “Syraq” since the collapse of the caliphate, and gave a historical explanation of how it developed its insurgent methodology. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 September 2018
The United States has launched at least five raids into Syria to date, all of them against the Islamic State (IS).[1] The second such raid, on 15 May 2015, killed Fathi al-Tunisi (Abu Sayyaf al-Iraqi, Abu Muhammad al-Iraqi, or Abd al-Ghani), who oversaw critical revenue-generating criminal schemes for the group. Al-Tunisi was primarily responsible for the oil industry in eastern Syria, in which capacity he collaborated with Bashar al-Asad’s regime, and he worked as head of the Antiquities Division of IS Diwan al-Rikaz, which translates literally as the “Department of Precious Things That Come Out of the Ground”, usually given as the “Department of Natural Resources”. Al-Tunisi was what is sometimes termed a “middle manager”: the connective tissue between the most senior levels of the leadership and local administrators, ensuring smooth coordination between the two by inter alia keeping the books. In short, the kind of terrorist operative that keeps an organisation going. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2018
Ahmad bin Sa’id al-Amudi (Abu Karam al-Hadrami) // Picture from page 9 of Al-Naba 133 (25 May 2018)
The 133rd edition of the Islamic State’s (IS) weekly newsletter, Al-Naba, was released on 25 May 2018. In Al-Naba, on page nine, there was a profile of Ahmad bin Sa’id al-Amudi (Abu Karam al-Hadrami), a Saudi jihadist who fought for IS and was killed in Yemen. Al-Naba has run obituaries for prominent IS operatives like Mohammed Emwazi (Abu Muharib al-Muhajir), often known as “Jihadi John”, very senior IS officials whose biographies were shrouded in mystery like Abdurrahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari) and Ali Aswad al-Jiburi (Abu Ayman al-Iraqi), as well as completely unknown figures like Abu Sulayman al-Libi. Al-Amudi is in this final category. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 May 2018
Saddam al-Jamal after his capture, 9 May 2018 (image source)
Saddam al-Jamal, born in al-Bukamal, a town near the Iraqi border in Syria’s the Deir Ezzor province, became a prominent example of a rebel against Bashar al-Asad’s regime who joined the Islamic State in 2013. It has now reported that al-Jamal has been arrested by the Iraqi government after an operation involving Turkey and the United States lured him into a trap. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 October 2017
Bashar al-Assad, Hussam al-Katerji, Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi)
Reuters reported on 11 October that Hussam al-Katerji, a member of Bashar al-Asad’s Syrian regime, has been engaged in trading wheat with the Islamic State (IS), helping supply the terrorists with resources to run their statelet and threaten the security of Syria’s neighbours and the wider world. This pattern of behaviour from the Asad regime—holding itself out as a counterterrorism partner, while it bolsters terrorist organizations—is well-established, and has its origins in the regime’s survival strategy: to destroy all acceptable opposition forces and make the Syrian war a binary contest between the dictatorship and terrorists. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 September 2017
Ali al-Aswad (Abu Ayman al-Iraqi), al-Naba, 20 July 2017
In the ninetieth edition of its newsletter, al-Naba, released on 20 July 2017, the Islamic State (IS) published an obituary for one of its most senior operatives, Ali Aswad al-Jiburi, much better known as Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, who had been serving as the caliph’s “security advisor” when he was killed on 18 May 2016. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 September 2017
The most recent issue of Perspectives on Terrorism had a paper by Ronen Zeidel entitled, ‘The Dawa’ish: A Collective Profile of IS Commanders’, which was “the first attempt to provide a comprehensive collective profile of commanders and leaders of the Islamic State (IS)”. Based on “an inventory of over 600 names”, the paper assessed the nationality, ethnicity, and tribal origins not just of the very senior IS commanders, but those lower down, a novel and much-needed line of investigation. Zeidel found that these commanders of the IS movement are or were overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni Arab, with an important Turkoman contingent.
Zeidel’s findings are important for drawing attention again to the local-revolutionary character of an organisation that gets a great deal of attention for its foreign fighters and external attacks, especially in the West, but which only a recently acquired global reach—and, indeed, only recently needed to: until 2011, the West was easily reachable since it had troops on the ground in Iraq, so the incentive to invest resources in creating a foreign terrorist apparatus was minimal.
One small part of Zeidel’s work has created something of a storm, however. Zeidel gives the occupation held by these commanders and, for those where this was known, 72% of them were former regime elements (FREs) from the dictatorship of Saddam Husayn. This reignited the argument over how important the FREs have been to IS. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 August 2017
A year ago, I wrote a report documenting the biographies of Islamic State (IS) leaders and something of the structure of the organisation. Since then, the intricacies of the structure have been further revealed, even as it has somewhat crumbled in practice. The caliphate—the statelet built by IS—has been significantly degraded: the Iraqi “capital”, Mosul, has fallen, and operation to clear the Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, is underway. More significantly, upwards of 40% of those profiled have been killed, so it seemed an opportune moment for an update on who currently leads the world’s most infamous terrorist movement.
Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 24, 2016
Article published at NOW Lebanon
The long arm of the Islamic State (ISIS) has struck again. Tuesday morning, Zaventem airport in Brussels was hit by two suicide bombers and soon after a third man detonated at Maelbeek metro station, not far from the headquarters of the European Union. At least 31 people were slaughtered and around 270 were injured. Belgium has a long history as a hub of global jihadism and some of its citizens were key in forming ISIS’s statelet. In the wake of the attack, as Western governments look for ways to hasten the demise of ISIS, it will likely be said—again—that the quickest way to do that is by striking a devil’s bargain with the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. From Assad’s role in helping ISIS lay its groundwork in Iraq even before the U.S. invasion to Assad’s help, by omission and commission, in nurturing ISIS in the years since the uprising against him began as a means of defeating the opposition to Assad’s deliberate incitement of a sectarian war, there is nothing that could be further from the truth. While Assad remains in power, ISIS will remain alive. Continue reading
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