By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 May 2020
Last night the State Department’s Rewards for Justice Program announced that it would pay $3 million for information leading to the capture or killing of Muhammad Khadr Musa Ramadan, described as “a senior leader of and key propagandist for the Islamic State”. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2020
Islamic State Wilayat al-Anbar, October 2017
This morning, the Iraqi government announced that Moataz Numan al-Jaburi (Haji Tayseer), a senior member of the Islamic State (IS), had been killed in Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria by an airstrike from the U.S.-led Coalition, utilising intelligence supplied by Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS, Jihaz Mukafahat al-Irhab). Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2020
Early in his new book, Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad, The Washington Institute’s Aaron Zelin quotes a pair of sociologists who note that ‘where theories are plentiful … ideas are vacuous’. The book is in many ways the antithesis of this approach. It is not without theoretical content; where social movement theory arises as a means of understanding jihadism, say, the author gives an overview of the literature to contextualise it for the reader. But the general approach is historical, empirical, and detail-rich, so that by the time Zelin summarises his findings in the various sections there can be no doubt about the evidentiary basis. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 March 2018
The 122nd edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter, was released on 9 March 2018 and contained an article, on page 3, suggesting that the use of takfir (excommunication) should be circumscribed. A rough translation is reproduced below. Continue reading