By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 6, 2014
SRF leader Jamal Marouf
What a disaster. With American and coalition jets in the air overhead, ostensibly to do battle with Salafi-jihadists, al-Qaeda has been allowed to push rebel brigades the United States purports to support out of almost all of Idlib Province. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 13, 2014
The only official picture of Jabhat an-Nusra’s Emir, Abu Muhammad al-Golani, given out by the Iraqi government.
Syria’s rebellion was already fighting for its life, squeezed between the regime and the Islamic State (I.S.) in Aleppo, and on Friday night a new front appeared to open. Jabhat an-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, announced that it was forming an Islamic Emirate. According to a translation by Hassan Hassan, Nusra’s commander, Abu Muhammad al-Golani, said that they would now start implementing the shari’a “in the full sense of the word,” and “without compromise, leniency, ambiguity, or politeness.” Golani specifically says that Nusra will begin implementing the hudud, the harsh punishments like amputation for theft, which Nusra has very deliberately not done so far, saying war conditions suspended such punishments according to the Holy Law. At a more material level, it avoided garnering them bad press for savagery against the civilian population. Golani dismissed with contempt the secular rebels as “grovelling” to the West, and declared I.S.’s Caliphate “void” and its members ghulat (extremists).
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 4, 2014
The spokesman of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, made a speech on 19 June 2013, a transcript of which is reproduced below. Al-Adnani’s speech was entitled, “Fadharhum wa-ma yaftarun”, variously translated as: “So Leave Them Alone With Their Devising”, “Leave Them Alone with their Fabrications”, and “Ignore Them and Their False Allegations”. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 3, 2014
Ayman al-Zawahiri, September 2013, AFP/Getty Images
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the then-Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), released an audio statement on 8 April 2013 asserting his authority over Jabhat al-Nusra, which was set up as the Syrian wing of ISI. Al-Nusra’s leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, rejected al-Baghdadi’s hostile takeover on 10 April and swore allegiance—renewed, in his telling—to al-Qaeda. The leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, ruled on this matter in a letter dated 23 May 2013, which was released to, and translated by, al-Jazeera, on 9 June 2013. Al-Zawahiri’s letter is reprinted below with some editions for clarity and some important sections highlighted in bold. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2014
On 10 April 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra’s leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, put out a speech, published by al-Manara al-Bayda, entitled, “About the Fields of Syria”. In the speech, al-Jolani rejected the statement from thirty-six hours earlier by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which revealed officially that al-Nusra was a front-organization for the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), and then al-Baghdadi asserted his authority publicly over al-Nusra, dissolving ISI and al-Nusra into a new group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This dispute would ultimately lead to ISIS being expelled from al-Qaeda’s network after it refused the orders of al-Qaeda’s leadership to return to Iraq and leave al-Nusra as al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria. A translation of this speech by jihadology.net is reproduced below with some minor editions for clarity and some interesting sections highlighted in bold. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 2, 2014
Al-Qaeda expelled the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from its ranks on February 3, 2014. This was the culmination of a dispute that broke into the public eye with ISIS’s declaration in April 2013, an effort by ISIS’s emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to formally subsume the secret Syrian wing of the then-Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), known as Jabhat an-Nusra, under his own banner, and the rejection of both al-Nusra’s leadership and al-Qaeda’s to this move. In truth, the schism between ISIS and al-Qaeda has its roots all the way back to the beginning, when ISIS became al-Qaeda’s Iraqi branch, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM), in 2004.
Below is the transcript of the audio address by al-Baghdadi, released by al-Furqan on 8 April 2013, entitled, “Give Good News to the Believers: The Declaration of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Some transliterations have been altered, the syntax has been cleared up, and some interesting or important sections highlighted in bold. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 24, 2014
There has long been speculation in Syrian oppositionist circles that the regime was colluding with the Qaeda-type forces in the insurgency, to shore-up its own base by frightening the minorities and to ward off external help to the rebellion from the West. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 21, 2014
On February 3, 2014, Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad (The Base of Holy War Organisation)—al-Qaeda—disowned ad-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa-Sham (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS), finally resolving the tortured question of the group’s “affiliation” with the terror network. Continue reading
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