Tag Archives: Sahwa

The Dissolution of Al-Qaeda in Iraq

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 January 2021

One of the few pictures in existence of Abd al-Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir)

Abd al-Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir) had become the leader of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM) after its founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, much better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been killed in June 2006. AQM was the dominant faction within the Islamic State (IS) when it was announced in October 2006 as a merger of jihadist insurgents, and for that reason most analysts at the time considered IS a “front” for AQM. When IS’s emir, Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi), made his first speech in December 2006 affirming the statehood declaration, most read this as the foreign-led AQM putting an Iraqi face on their enterprise. In fact, as can now be seen, dynamics were essentially as presented by the jihadists.

Crucial was a speech Al-Badawi gave on 10 November 2006, his fifth of what would prove to be fifteen, released by Al-Furqan Media Foundation within IS’s “ministry of information”, entitled, “I’na al-Hukm I’la Allah” (إن الحكم إلا لله), something like “Judgment is Only for God” or “Judgment is God’s Only”, where he gave his bay’a (oath of allegiance) to Al-Zawi, put AQM’s troops under Al-Zawi’s command, and effectively dissolved Al-Qaeda’s presence in Iraq. A transcript of the speech is available here, and a summary of the speech is below. Continue reading →

Islamic State Spokesman Vows Revenge Against Enemies, Plays the Israel Card

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 February 2020

The Islamic State’s (IS) spokesman, Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi, gave his second speech on 27 January 2020. The speech was entitled, “Allah Destroyed Everything Over Them, and for the Kafireen is Something Comparable”, by IS’s official English translation. The title is drawn from the Qur’an, the Surah of Muhammad (47), verse 10. The verse can be rendered as, “God Destroyed Them Completely, and a Similar Fate Awaits the Disbelievers”. Below is a copy of the transcript of Abu Hamza’s speech, with some editions for transliteration and translation, and some interesting sections highlighted in bold. Continue reading →

The First Speech of Islamic State Spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 November 2019

Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) [right] appearing in an Islamic State video alongside Tarkhan Batirashvili (Abu Umar al-Shishani, 3 June 2017, displaying a scene from 2014 when IS demolished the borders between Iraq and Syria. Falaha was killed in August 2016. It is common for IS to hold back pictures and footage of its leaders for time-spans that can reach over a decade.

Taha Falaha was the effective deputy of the Islamic State (IS) when he was killed on 30 August 2016, by which time he was also overseeing the foreign attacks campaign by IS and serving as governor of the IS-held areas in Syria. Likely, however, Falaha, is best-known internationally by his kunya, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, and for his role as IS’s official spokesman, particularly his speech in September 2014 inciting Muslims in the West to commit terrorist attacks against their native countries. Falaha had been recruited in Aleppo in 2002 by IS’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) and steadily advanced through IS’s media department, eventually being announced as the official spokesman with his first speech, released on 1 August 2011. An English-language transcript of that first speech, an hour-long audio message entitled, al-Dawlat al-Islam Baqiya (“The Islamic State Remains” or “The Islamic State Endures”), was released by “Ansar al-Mujahideen English Forum Language and Translation Department” and was posted to their forum on 4 March 2012. The transcript is reproduced below with some editions from the Arabic transcript and some important parts highlighted in bold. Continue reading →

Islamic State Profiles the Leadership

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 April 2019

Islamic State flag in front of the main gate of Saddam Husayn’s palace in Tikrit, 5 April 2015 // AFP PHOTO / MOHAMMED SAWAF

A lengthy document—roughly sixty pages and 12,000 words—was published online on 21 February 2019 containing biographies of twenty-seven senior Islamic State (IS) officials, past and more recent. Those bios that are dated were written between October 2018 and the time of publication, with one exception that was written in the summer of 2018. The author claims to be an IS veteran. While longevity is difficult to prove, the fact that the author provides heretofore unseen images of some of the IS leaders suggests that at a minimum he is an IS operative. Continue reading →

The Islamic State’s Lessons-Learned About Insurgency

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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 →

What Questions Remain About 9/11?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 September 2018

In less than a week, it will be the seventeenth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s “Plane’s Operation”, the assault on the United States. It is a vertiginous enough reflection that many of us have been alive more years since 11 September 2001 than before it, and positively alarming that many of those who will soon move into the government, media, and other leading societal institutions will have been born after an event that still shapes so much of the international scene. As Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan put it in The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 (2011), we are left with “the brief name ‘9/11’,” the context and meaning stripped away all this time later. The book is a useful overview of an event that should always be to some degree fresh in mind, though it is not without its problems in its analytical sections. Continue reading →

Reviewing the Iraqi Surge and Awakening

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Book Review: Carter Malkasian, ‘Illusions of Victory’, Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. 280.

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 July 2018

Carter Malkasian sets out in Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State to upend the conventional understanding of the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) movement, known at the time as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), in Anbar province of western Iraq. Continue reading →

Islamic State Claims its Switch to Insurgency and Terrorism is Working

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 December 2017

Al-Naba 112, page 3

The 112th edition of the Islamic State’s newsletter, Al-Naba, released on 29 December 2017 contained an article on page 3, which reported that the reversion from statehood to insurgency was yielding results, particularly in the Diyala, Kirkuk, and Saladin provinces of Iraq. The article is reproduced below. Continue reading →

Islamic State Officially Gives Up the Caliphate, Returns to Insurgency

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 November 2017

Al-Naba 101, page 8

In the 101st edition of the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter al-Naba (page 8-9), released on 12 October 2017, the organization gave some fascinating details about how they responded to the “defeat” inflicted on them in 2007-08 by the American surge and the tribal Sahwa (Awakening) forces. The article describes how IS switched wholly to insurgent-terrorist tactics, dismantling its conventional fighting units and even its sniper teams in March 2008, and training in hit-and-run bombings. The leadership at that time, the emir Hamid al-Zawi (Abu Umar al-Baghdadi) and his deputy, the “war minister” Abdul Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), encountered some initial scepticism, but the rank-and-file soon came on board when they saw its effectiveness. IS says that it is time to return to this form of warfare. In short, IS marked a switch in al-Naba 101 entirely from the statehood and governance phase of its revolutionary warfare, back into insurgency mode. The article is reproduced below. Continue reading →

Don’t Celebrate the Fall of Raqqa Just Yet

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 October 2017

Raqqa city has been destroyed (image source)

The Islamic State (IS) captured Raqqa city, its first provincial capital, in January 2014. Six months later, IS declared its caliphate and Raqqa became its de facto capital. Last Tuesday, the partner force of the US-led anti-IS Coalition, the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), entered the city centre in Raqqa. A deal had evacuated most of the remaining jihadists over the prior weekend, though a determined core remained and still held about 10 per cent of the city. The caliphate is crumbling and the Coalition says IS has 6,500 fighters left. According to the Coalition, this puts IS “on the verge of a devastating defeat”. Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe this is true. To the contrary, IS is more powerful at this point, in theatre, even after the military reverses inflicted on it by the Coalition, than in the period after the “defeat” of 2008, and the outlook is more favourable now to IS. Moreover, IS now has an international reach, physically and ideologically, it did not previously possess. Continue reading →