By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 March 2021
Tsar Pavel I
A few days ago, it was the 220th anniversary of the palace coup that, in the early hours of 24 March 1801, deposed the Russian Tsar, Pavel (Paul) I, the last of the Russian monarchs to fall in this way.[1] Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 November 2020
Al-Naba 258, page 3
In the 258th edition of Al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) weekly newsletter, the main editorial on page three is entitled, “Fight the Heads of Disbelief, Perhaps They Will Desist”, and addresses the ongoing and now international dispute after the murder of Samuel Paty, a French schoolteacher, on 16 October. Paty had, after offering those who wanted to leave that opportunity, shown the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo during a class on free speech, and was subsequently beheaded by an Islamist accusing him of blasphemy. In the two weeks since, many Islamist and jihadist groups and individuals, as well as alarming proportions of ordinary Muslims, even in Western countries, have said Paty deserved what he got—albeit at varying levels of openness. A similar message has been transmitted by a number of governments in Muslim-majority countries, notably Turkey and Pakistan, who have effectively blamed France for the atrocity, either citing the French version of secularism (laïcité), racism, or some other grievance. The primary message of IS’s editorial is to declare itself unimpressed with these stances. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 October 2020
Al-Naba 257, page 3
The 257th edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), was released on 22 October. Al-Naba 257 contains an article praising the 16 October murder of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty by an Islamist who accused him of blasphemy for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Islam’s prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech, but the article does not claim that the Chechen refugee who carried out the assassination, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was an IS operative. Among other things, this is a reminder that IS’s claims of responsibility are not indiscriminate, even if it is believed there have been a couple of incidents of high-profile deception. 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 11 June 2020
France announced last Friday that its forces in Mali had killed Abd al-Malek Drukdel (Abu Musab Abd al-Wadud), the emir of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which covers the North Africa and Sahel areas. Paris has sometimes been unreliable on these matters, but the United States independently confirmed Drukdel was gone, as have sources within AQIM. The French also announced that on 19 May they had arrested Mohamed Mrabat, a veteran jihadist and member of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS). Continue readingBy 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
Published at The Arab Weekly
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 June 2019
An Islamic State being led into the Iraqi Criminal Court in Baghdad, 5 May 2019 (AP)
From May 26 to June 3, Iraq’s government sentenced to death 11 Islamic State operatives who had been captured in Syria. The novelty in the cases was that the Iraqis said the militants were French and ten of them were. The other was Tunisian.
The French government has made a pro forma protest against the death sentences but did nothing to impede the process. This is of a piece with the general approach European countries, including Britain, have taken to their citizens who joined jihadi groups in the Levant. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 April 2019
Ahmad al-Shara (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani) [image source]
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 March 2019
Al-Naba 175, page 8
Kirk Woodman, a Canadian geologist working for a Vancouver-based mining company, Progress Minerals Inc., was found dead in Oudalan province, north-east Burkina Faso, on 16 January 2019. Woodman had been kidnapped the previous day from a mining camp. Ouagadougou announced that Woodman had been killed the following day. Woodman’s body was described as “bullet-riddled”. It was noted by one outlet that Woodman had been taken in “a border region infiltrated by jihadis”, but not very much more has been said of the case in the last two months. On 28 March, the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the murder in the 175th edition of its weekly newsletter, Al-Naba. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 March 2019
Fabien Clain, Al-Naba 173, page 9
The U.S.-led Coalition against the Islamic State (IS) announced on 28 February that it had killed Fabien Clain (Abu Anas al-Firansi), a French citizen. Clain and his brother, Jean-Michel (Abu Uthman), were targeted by a Coalition airstrike in Baghuz, the final pocket of the “caliphate” in eastern Syria, on 20 February. It was unclear what happened to Jean-Michel, though the 173rd edition of IS’s newsletter, Al-Naba, published on 14 March, says (pp. 9-10) that he was killed a few days after Fabien. Continue reading
