Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-142-Caliphate-ISIS-7

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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-142-Caliphate-ISIS-7

The irony is that the majority of these so-called moderate oppositionists, who receive assistance in the form of weapons, funds and foreign instructors, eventually join the ISIL club for ideological considerations!

This is a global threat, which requires a global response. The world should recognize the severity of the danger and make it a top priority, rather than an afterthought. The foremost priority when it comes to ISIL should be neither Iraq nor Syria but the whole region.

Lest we forget other terrorist organizations have pledged loyalty to ISIL. They are expanding their sphere to Sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, Libya, and even occupied Palestine, where some Persian Gulf Arab states “believe Israel can work magic.”

“The battle with ISIS in Qalamoun has started,” the Hezbollah chief declared in a televised speech. “They (ISIS) started the battle. No problem. We will finish it,” Nasrallah added

We need a global coalition to prevent fanatics like ISIL, an al-Qaeda spinoff, from taking charge and spreading its violent creed across the globe. There is no alternative.

ISIS would need ‘foreign hand’ to rise in Afghanistan – ex-president Karzai to RTThe ex-president also addressed Washington, urging it to “explain to the world whether they have failed in the war on terror, or if the war on terror has gone out of hand.” The rise of the Islamic State in Afghanistan would threaten neighboring Russia and China, but it won’t be possible without the jihadist group receiving foreign backing

Previous, While the establishment of the so called Islamic State was sudden, and has survived its first year, the emergence of ISIL took a decade in the making. One year ago, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took Mosul, declared a caliphate ruling over an "Islamic State", reshaping the history of an entire region, if not an entire faith. Regardless of the future fate of ISIL, the events of the summer of 2014 serve as a pivotal shift in both the history of the Middle East and the Islamic faith

Qaid believes the Libyan affiliate takes its orders from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his lieutenants in Syria. “We think its near-term strategic aim is to provoke the West to focus its attention on Libya and divert the international coalition so the attacks on Daesh in Syria and Iraq will diminish.” Tactically, ISIS will aim to take over another town. He expects more suicide bombings in Tripoli and Misrata and more atrocities like the beheading of Christians in January on the shores of Sirte, to push the West to intervene. Time is running out for the Libyans to stop spinning in circles. “The seed of Daesh has been planted but it is still young, but if we ignore this threat it will grow quickly and will be more difficult to uproot. It is important we confront it now.” ---- Abd al-Wahhab Muhammad Qaid, a former member of the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, whose brother, Abu Yahya al-Libi, became a luminary of al Qaeda and was killed by an American drone strike in Pakistan in June 2012

June 11, Al Qaeda has been “ripped apart” by the rise of the Islamic State group, which has drained the terrorist organization of money and recruits, and left its leadership increasingly

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isolated, according to a report from the Guardian, citing interviews with two of al Qaeda's spiritual leaders. Abu Qatada, a Jordanian preacher who has long been associated with al Qaeda, and jihadi scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was the spiritual mentor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda leader in Iraq, both told the paper that the group had been seriously affected by ISIS' rise. “There is no organizational structure,” Maqdisi said, adding that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was cut off from his commanders, and that “loyalty” was the only thing keeping the group together.

Jun. 10, 2015 | 05:27 PM (Last updated: June 10, 2015 | 07:09 PM)

Nasrallah vows to 'finish' battle with ISIS in northeast Lebanon. Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah speaks on Al-Manar, Wednesday, June 10, 2015. (The Daily Star/Al-Manar, image grab) Hashem Osseiran| The Daily Star. BEIRUT: ISIS initiated a battle Tuesday after attacking Hezbollah posts on Lebanon's northeastern border, but the party will finish it, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah vowed Wednesday. “The battle with ISIS in Qalamoun has started,” the Hezbollah chief declared in a televised speech. “They (ISIS) started the battle. No problem. We will finish it,” Nasrallah added. "Yesterday's (Tuesday's) attacks hit several targets, but Hezbollah fighters were brave in their response and scored several casualties and destroyed a lot of their vehicles." "The resistance also suffered casualties during this battle," he said, honoring those who died. "We will continue [with the battle] until all terrorists are uprooted. We confirm that we will not let any terrorist remain on the outskirts." ISIS militants launched surprise attacks on four Hezbollah posts early Tuesday on the outskirts of the northeastern town of Ras Baalbek, sparking the deadliest clashes on the border with Syria since the start of the Qalamoun offensive last month. A security source told The Daily Star that eight Hezbollah fighters and 48 militants died in the initial attack and ensuing clashes. The deaths brought to 39 the number of Hezbollah fighters killed since May 4, when Hezbollah and its Syrian army allies launched an offensive to oust jihadis from the Qalamoun mountain range along the border. Until Tuesday, the offensive mostly targeted Nusra Front-led jihadis who controlled most of the Qalamoun region stretching from Arsal's eastern outskirts down to the outskirts of Tfail. But Tuesday's confrontation marked the entrance of ISIS into the battle. ISIS, which is hostile to both Nusra and Hezbollah, controls the outskirts north of Arsal. Nasrallah said Hezbollah had achieved major victories against Nusra since it entered Arsal's outskirts more than one week ago, capturing important peaks and mountains. Hezbollah-run Al-Manar reported this week that Nusra has lost 90 percent of the territory it had controlled in Qalamoun before the start of the offensive, which began in southern Qalamoun and moved north toward Arsal. Nusra is largely surrounded by Hezbollah from the south, Hezbollah and the Syrian army from the east, ISIS from the north, and the Lebanese Army from the west.

ISIS would need ‘foreign hand’ to rise in Afghanistan – ex-president Karzai to RTPublished time: June 11, 2015 21:46

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai. (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)The rise of the Islamic State in Afghanistan would threaten neighboring Russia and China,


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but it won’t be possible without the jihadist group receiving foreign backing, Hamid Karzai, former Afghan president, told RT’s Worlds Apart show.Islamic State (IS), called Daesh in Arabic, is “quite alien” to Afghanistan, former President Karzai said when asked how much of a threat he thinks jihadists pose to his country. Reports earlier this week suggested that between 10 and 12 Taliban fighters had been beheaded by the Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL) in the Nangarhar province, at the border with Pakistan. The region is believed to be one of a key targets for jihadists as the organization looks to seize even more territories, adding Afghanistan to taken lands in Iraq and Syria. However, Karzai believes that IS expansion into Afghanistan would not be possible “without a foreign hand, without a foreign backing.” But should this happen, “it will only be to go further to Central Asia, to hurt China, to hurt Russia.” “So, if you hear ever in the coming days, or months, or years that Daesh is on the rise in Afghanistan, and is strong and expanding militarily, it will mean that it is a foreign-backed force intending to destabilize the region, particularly Central Asia, China and Russia,” he added. Karzai put the blame for the rapid expansion of IS on “foreign interference” in Iraq and Syria saying that it was all “the result of events” there. Karzai once again criticized the US and its allies for interfering in Afghanistan, saying that the declared war on terror lasted over a decade “without the results that we all expected.” “Unfortunately, the Afghans suffered heavily in this war on terror, and terrorism and extremism rather than being defeated, or reduced, or eliminated, is steadily and widely on the rise. We have more radicalism today than we ever had before. We have more extremism than we ever had before,” he said. The ex-president also addressed Washington, urging it to “explain to the world whether they have failed in the war on terror, or if the war on terror has gone out of hand.” The 57-year-old politician stressed that during his presidency he was unhappy with many aspects of the US’s behavior in Afghanistan, which was always a “strong point of disagreement” between Kabul and Washington. While the Americans and “the world” knew “that the sanctuaries, the training grounds, the motivation factors for terrorism lay beyond Afghanistan, and they told us repeatedly that they were in Pakistan,” the US troops still bombed Afghan villages and imprisoned Afghan people, Karzai stressed. According to Karzai, the problems with the US war on terror in Afghanistan is explained by the fact the Americans didn’t want to side with either the Afghan government forces or the Taliban. “I very much believe there was a policy of duality; that they were running with the hare and hunting with the hound. And that's why there were these failures, and that's why there was this suffering for the Afghan people, and also for the Americans,” he said. Yet, Karzai did not rule out that peace between Afghanistan and the US is possible. However, for this to happen, Washington should change its strategic thinking in the war on terror and give up on this duality, he added. At the same time, Karzai, who was Afghan leader from 2004-2014, also supported the idea of talks with the Taliban, who he referred to as “our brothers”, “who are from Afghanistan”. He stressed that the peace process in the country is also hampered by foreign influence. “I know for a fact for so many years that those Taliban do want to come back to Afghanistan, but they don't have the ability collectively to do that because there are other forces in this region, including… the Pakistani military and intelligence that is stopping them from doing that,” he explained. Karzai remains an important figure in Afghanistan after his resignation and has been trying to use his international connections to help the struggling state. He visited India for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May and is expected to arrive in Moscow later this month for a series of meetings, including with President Vladimir Putin.

‘US created conditions for ISIS’: RT talks to Iraqi Shia militia as they leave to fightPublished time: June 11, 2015 15:49



An RT reporter has spent a day with a group of Iraqi Shia fighters amid its final preparations for a battle against Islamic State. Blaming the US for the war and the rise of the militant group, they vow to protect their land and religious sites. “This is both a nationalistic war and a sacred war, nationalistic in the sense we are defending our land and sacred in the sense that we are defending our religious sites,” Qais Khazali, a leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), an Iraqi Shia paramilitary group, told RT’s Eisa Ali. The RT reporter traveled to the Taji base north of Baghdad to meet the anti-Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters. “ISIS we are coming, just wait a few days God willing, we won't leave one of them alive,” the young militia fighters vowed. Khazali, the founder and head of AAH, blames the US for the rise of Islamic State because it is Washington, he says, that “created the conditions.” “They did so with their policy in Syria. But we are present everywhere fighting against ISIS,” Khazali said. Between 2006 and 2007, Asaib Ahl Haq launched some of the deadliest attacks during the American occupation that lasted eight years, from 2003 to 2011. AAH troops are said to be trained by Iranian forces and Hezbollah. Khazali was kidnapped by US troops in 2007 for killing American soldiers, but was released in 2010 in a prisoner swap in exchange for four UK citizens who had been taken hostage by AAH in May 2007. Now Asaib Ahl Haq has been credited with retaking some key territories from IS, including Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. Apart from Islamic State militants, the group also fought Syrian rebels, as well as Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. When Mosul fell last summer, most of its fighters headed back to Iraq to fight radical Islamic groups there. It has been almost a year since Islamic State hit the headlines. They invaded huge areas in Syria and Iraq. The militants captured Iraq’s second city of Mosul (population 2.5mn) in June 2014, as government forces retreated from the country’s Sunni stronghold. The city remains in IS hands, with minorities persecuted and people being killed. IS has seized one-third of Iraq over the past year. It now controls two provincial capitals, as well as the city of Fallujah. Forces have retaken Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad, but many of its residents have been unable to return due to buildings being rigged with explosives. While both the international community along with Iraq and Syria are struggling to bring Islamic State down, jihadists threaten to seize more territory and improve its fighting efficiency. In May, in its propaganda magazine Dabiq, IS announced it was aiming to develop a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), saying with the pace it was expanding it would buy its first WMD within a year. Jun 10, 2015 9:50

We Need a Global Coalition to Defeat the Face of Evil

TEHRAN (FNA 10 June)- The United States and its regional cronies don’t want to see ISIL defeated. They want ISIL to break up Iraq and Syria into denominations as it coincides with their strategic aims. That explains why the terrorist group is advancing across the region. It is settling in some regions of Libya; there are problems in Lebanon;

and there is even evidence of an ISIL presence in Afghanistan. In parallel, other terrorist groups are stepping up their actions too, including al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. Under the circumstances, those who buy into America’s anti-ISIL coalition and/or airstrikes are only fooling themselves. The suspicious airstrikes – sometimes targeting Iraqi and Syrian forces - have not yet had an impact on ISIL’s ability to further expand its cross-border rule. Under the pretext of fighting ISIL, the US and its cohorts continue to aid “moderate” terrorist groups in Syria too. The irony is that the majority of these so-called moderate oppositionists, who



receive assistance in the form of weapons, funds and foreign instructors, eventually join the ISIL club for ideological considerations! Nonetheless, the international community, even the US-led alliance, knows it just too well that training “moderate” terrorists and carrying out airstrikes are not going to deliver on the task. There has to be another approach if they truly want to defeat terrorism. This is a global threat, which requires a global response. The world should recognize the severity of the danger and make it a top priority, rather than an afterthought. The foremost priority when it comes to ISIL should be neither Iraq nor Syria but the whole region. As consistently advocated by Iran and Russia, ISIL is the face of evil and can only be defeated through united efforts, as per international law, and in strict compliance with the United Nations and its resolutions. The world cannot fight terrorism in one territory (Iraq) and support terrorism in another territory (Syria). It just doesn’t make sense. Moreover, as long as the focus is only on one country, there will be no common strategy to address a wider region that is facing the same threat. Lest we forget other terrorist organizations have pledged loyalty to ISIL. They are expanding their sphere to Sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, Libya, and even occupied Palestine, where some Persian Gulf Arab states “believe Israel can work magic.” The US, Israel and their Arab allies might spar in public, but share an interest in countering what they see as rising Iranian influence in the Middle East. They share strategic goals, particularly around the regional ascendance of Iran, regime change in Syria and partitioning of Iraq. It’s all the reason why the terror-mongers don’t qualify to be at the forefront of the war on terror. We need a global coalition to prevent fanatics like ISIL, an al-Qaeda spinoff, from taking charge and spreading its violent creed across the globe. There is no alternative.

Al-Qaida 'cut off and ripped apart by Isis'Exclusive: Insiders say group has been drained of Middle East recruits and that US wrongfooted by shift in balance of power between warring jihadi groups

On 5 February, Jordanian officials confirmed that the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, had been released from prison. Though he is little known in the west, Maqdisi’s importance in the canon of radical Islamic thought is unrivalled by anyone alive. The 56-year-old Palestinian rose to prominence in the 1980s, when he became the first significant radical Islamic scholar to declare the Saudi royal family were apostates, and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. At the time, Maqdisi’s writings were so radical that even Osama bin Laden thought they were too extreme.

Today, Maqdisi counts the leader of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as a personal friend, and he is held in the highest esteem by the rest of al-Qaida’s regional heads, from North Africa to Yemen. His numerous books and pamphlets are required reading for Islamic militants around the world, who eagerly follow the latest proclamations on Maqdisi’s website, the Pulpit of Monotheism and Jihad. But he may be best known for personally mentoring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded the organisation that would later become Isis, while the two men were jailed together on terrorism charges in Jordan in the mid-1990s. Zarqawi was released in 1999



and, after swearing allegiance to al-Qaida, went on to become one of the most notorious figures in postwar Iraq, unleashing a brutal campaign of sectarian terror, which led Maqdisi to publicly upbraid his most famous student in a series of devastating public critiques.

Now the man US terrorism analysts call “the most influential living jihadi theorist” has turned his ire toward Isis – and emerged, in the last year, as one of the group’s most powerful critics. Soon after the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of a caliphate last June, Maqdisi released a long tract castigating Isis as ignorant and misguided, accusing them of subverting the “Islamic project” that

he has long nurtured. This map from Feb. 7, 2014, shows how just a year ago it seemed as though the

Islamic State was mostly on its own. Here's an overview of what has happened since then.

Maqdisi’s war of words with Isis is emblematic of the new fratricidal split within violent Islamic radicalism – but it is also a sign that al-Qaida, once the world’s most feared terrorist network, knows it has been surpassed.

Isis has not simply eclipsed al-Qaida on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and in the competition for funding and new recruits. According to a series of exclusive interviews with senior jihadi ideologues, Isis has successfully launched “a coup” against al-Qaida to destroy it from within. As a consequence, they now admit, al-Qaida – as an idea and an organisation – is now on the verge of collapse.

* * *

On a sunny spring afternoon, three weeks after his release from prison, Maqdisi sat on a sofa at his friend Abu Qatada’s house, fuming about Isis: the group had lied to him and betrayed him, he said, and its members were not worthy of calling themselves mujahideen. “They are like a mafia group,” Abu Qatada added, while Maqdisi nodded his assent.

Abu Qatada – who successive British home secretaries tried to deport to Jordan on terror-related charges – has joined Maqdisi as one of the most prominent radical clerics to publicly attack Isis, and his statements of condemnation have been even more scathing. Initially, their strategy seemed to be to bring Isis back under the authority of al-Qaida, using something like


http://www.theguardian.com/world/abu-qatada


a good cop, bad cop approach: Maqdisi played the role of the disappointed father, admonishing and giving guidance in equal measure, while Abu Qatada has poured increasing amounts of scorn on them.

The list of Isis’s crimes that have offended Maqdisi and Abu Qatada is long. They include creating division within the wider jihadi movement, publicly snubbing Zawahiri and establishing a caliphate to which Isis demands every other jihadi swear fealty or face death. For more than a year both say they have worked behind the scenes, negotiating with Isis – including with Baghdadi himself – to bring the group back into the al-Qaida fold, to no avail. “Isis don’t respect anyone. They are ruining the wider jihadi movement and are against the whole ummah [Muslim nation],” Abu Qatada said.

Isis are ruining the wider jihadi movement and are against the whole ummah

Abu Qatada Isis has been sufficiently worried by the increasingly vehement criticism from Maqdisi and Abu Qatada to embark on a social media campaign against them – said to have been sanctioned by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Isis’s chief propagandist. Isis social media accounts berate the two al-Qaida clerics as “stooges” of the west, part of a growing conspiracy against the caliphate. The sixth issue of Isis’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, featured a full-page picture of Maqdisi and Abu Qatada, labelled as “misleading scholars” who should be avoided more than the devil himself. “Qatada and I have been critical of them,” Maqdisi said. “They hate that.” The two ideologues make an odd pair in the fight against Isis. Qatada is 6ft 3in tall, broad shouldered and lumbering, while Maqdisi is rake thin and full of hyperactive energy, bounding round the room and speaking at double speed; at serious moments, Maqdisi is given to making a sudden joke or bursting into giggles.

Sometimes they will go for walks with each other in the Jordanian countryside. More often they travel long distances by road after being asked to attend funerals of fallen al-Qaida fighters.Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida. Photograph: Mustafa Khalili

Maqdisi’s notoriety has ensured that he has spent most of the past two decades in and out of jail. (He claims to have been subject to torture – which is indeed widespread in Jordanian prisons; pulling the hairs out of a radical’s beard, he said, is one favoured method of inflicting pain.) It is widely believed that the Jordanians released him again this February because they realised, with Isis rampaging across the region, that his stature made him a valuable ally in the struggle against the militant group. But Maqdisi and Qatada have looked on as Isis’s young radicals rampage from victory to victory – cursing, mocking and betraying the old guard as


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they go, while al-Qaida, largely guided by veterans of the Afghan era, has been brought to its knees in this jihadi civil war.

As Qatada poured tea into small glass tumblers, he began reeling off images to better communicate the depth of his loathing for Isis. He likes speaking in metaphors. The group, he said, was “like a bad smell” that has polluted the radical Islamic environment. No, they were better described as a “cancerous growth” within the jihadi movement – or, he continued, like the diseased branch of a fig tree that needs to be pruned before it kills the entire organism. Qatada, who was once described by the British Special Immigration Appeals Commission as a “truly dangerous individual … at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qaida”, has a strained, high-pitched voice, like an alto version of Marlon Brando in The Godfather; he speaks slowly, pausing for effect. His broad frame easily filled one of the throne-like Louis-XIV-style armchairs that line his reception room. Comfortably ensconced, he turned to yet another metaphor to describe how Isis has recruited a generation of young Muslims who barely remember the 9/11 attacks. “You go to a restaurant and they present to you this beautiful meal. It looks so delicious and tempting. But then you go into the kitchen and you see the dirt and the filth and you’re disgusted.”

Both men are particularly appalled, they said, by the way Isis has used their scholarship to cloak its savagery in ideological legitimacy, to gain recruits and justify its battle with al-Qaida and its affiliates. “Isis took all our religious works,” Maqdisi said. “They took it from us – it’s all our writings, they are all our books, our thoughts.” Now, Abu Qatada said, “they don’t respect anyone”. Such impudent behaviour, the two men agreed, would never have been accepted in the days when Bin Laden was alive. “No one used to speak against him,” Maqdisi lamented. “Bin Laden was a star. He had special charisma.” But despite their personal affection for his successor, Zawahiri – whom they call “Dr Ayman” – they both admit that he does not possess the authority and control to rebuff the threat from Isis. From the “very beginning” of his tenure, Zawahiri lacked “direct military or operational control,” Qatada said. “He has become accustomed to operating in this decentralised way – he is isolated.” According to Maqdisi, al-Qaida’s organisational structure has “collapsed”. Zawahiri, Maqdisi said, “operates solely based on allegiance. There is no organisational structure. There is only communication channels, and loyalty.” And unfortunately for Zawahiri, Isis has done its utmost to ensure that loyalty is in short supply.

The radical cleric Abu Qatada says Isis is a ‘cancerous growth’ within the jihadi movement. Photograph: Mustafa Khalili

Dr Munif Samara – a veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan and a close associate of Maqdisi and Qatada, who sat with both men as they were interviewed – painted an even more gloomy picture of al-Qaida’s position. A GP who runs a free clinic treating injured Syrian fighters and civilians, Samara has more experience than Maqdisi or Qatada with the day-to-day operations of jihadi organising, and has often handled the affairs of the two men during their frequent jail stints. He said that donations, which once came in waves of “hundreds of thousands”, have dried up as donors directed their money to Isis, or else refused to fund further bloodletting between the two groups. Another former al-Qaida member, Aimen Dean – who defected to become a spy for British intelligence – told the Guardian that one of his sources in Pakistan’s tribal areas said the finances of al-Qaida central in Waziristan were so desperate that it was reduced at one point last year to selling its laptops and cars to buy food and pay rent.


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Samara described Isis’s fight against al-Qaida as an attempt to bring the older group down from within. “At this moment, we do believe there is a coup d’etat under way within al-Qaida itself,” he said. * * * May 2011

In the decade after 9/11, al-Qaida attracted money, initiates and prestige like no other jihadi group in history. It grew to command the loyalty of a wide network of terrorist branches and affiliates that stretched from Europe to Africa and South Asia. Never before had so many geographically disparate groups been united under one banner. Bin Laden achieved this feat, at least in part, by remaining ideologically flexible. He refused to be proscriptive on small matters of faith, avoiding the kind of disputes that had ripped apart other jihadi coalitions in the past. In keeping with its formal name – Tandheem Qaidat al-Jihad, The Organisation for the Base of Jihad – al-Qaida acted as a hub for militants to make connections and receive financial and organisational support. Regional commanders were entrusted with a great deal of operational freedom.

The finances of al-Qaida were so desperate that it was reduced to selling its laptops and cars to buy food and pay rent

In return, al-Qaida’s leadership demanded one thing above all else: loyalty. Its commanders were strictly vetted before being appointed; only those known from the battlefields of

Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya – and deemed to have the requisite knowledge of Islamic scholarship – were elevated to the group’s upper echelons. On their appointment, these senior commanders swore a blood oath to Bin Laden himself.

When Zawahiri took over after Bin Laden’s death in 2011, he found himself geographically isolated. While he was hiding out, according to numerous sources, in the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the centre of jihadi activity had moved thousands of miles away, to Syria and Iraq. As Pakistan’s army and American drones tightened

their net around al-Qaida central, it became harder and harder for Zawahiri to maintain contact with his commanders in the field. “What is leadership,” Samara asked, “if your leader is in Afghanistan and your soldiers are in Iraq?”



In fact, al-Qaida’s main branch in the Middle East, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), had long been a source of difficulty. Since its effective creation in 2003, under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ISI had been happy to use al-Qaida’s brand name and its money, but often ignored pleas for closer communication with central command – even when they came from Bin Laden himself. In 2010, they crossed a line: ISI appointed a new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, without prior approval from al-Qaida, whose senior leaders knew almost nothing about the man – where he had come from, his military experience, whether he could be trusted.

In a revealing communique seized during the raid on Bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Adam Gadahn – the American al-Qaida member and frequent spokesman – voiced his disgust with ISI’s lack of respect. Writing to Bin Laden in January 2011, he asked why ISI should be permitted to sully al-Qaida’s name with its indiscriminate slaughter when it could not even bother to keep in touch with the group’s leadership. “Maybe,” he wrote, “it is better for them not to be in the ranks of the mujahideen, as they are just like a polluted spot that should be removed and sanitised and cleared from the ranks.” Less than six months after receiving the letter, Bin Laden was dead. Now it fell to Zawahiri, a man of lesser standing, to deal with the problem.

By this time, ISI had been pushed to the brink of collapse by US and Iraqi forces – but the Syrian civil war gave the group a chance to rebuild. As the conflict began to intensify, Baghdadi quietly dispatched one of his junior officers, Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, across the border in late 2011 to take advantage of the chaos. Equipped with funds, weapons, and some of ISI’s best soldiers, Joulani’s group – which would soon be known as the Nusra Front – quickly became the most formidable fighting force in Syria. By 2013, Joulani was such a powerful commander in his own right that Baghdadi feared he was on the verge of obtaining Zawahiri’s support to elevate himself as the leader of an independent al-Qaida

branch in Syria.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida, has struggled to assert his authority from his hideout in Waziristan. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

On 8 April 2013, Baghdadi launched a pre-emptive strike – whose consequences would rip apart the banner of unity that had long presided over the jihadi movement. In an audio recording released online, Baghdadi declared that the Nusra Front and ISI would officially become one organisation. Nusra’s battle-stained banners, which hung over their newly captured headquarters in Syrian cities such as Raqqa, Aleppo and Homs would be replaced. The merged organisation would be called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or more simply Isis. The rebrand was effective immediately. Two days later, Joulani replied with his own audio message. He rejected Baghdadi’s “invitation” to merge – and pledged an oath of loyalty directly to Zawahiri, appealing to the “sheikh of jihad” to resolve the dispute.

Within 24 hours, Zawahiri dispatched a private message urging calm. He said he wanted both commanders to send him representations before he would rule on this spat, which had, thanks to the internet, become embarrassingly public. Baghdadi made it clear that he was not willing to compromise: in a personal message, he warned Zawahiri that any hint of support for the “traitor” would have “no cure except the spilling of more blood”.


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On 23 May, Zawahiri delivered his verdict: Isis, which had been created without prior approval, would have to be “dissolved”; Baghdadi was ordered to restrict his operations to Iraq. Meanwhile, his former junior, Joulani, would become the leader of al-Qaida’s official branch in Syria. Both men, Zawahiri added, had a year to prove themselves, after which al-Qaida central would decide on what measures to take next. Like any suspended sentence, it was both an offer of redemption and a threat: Baghdadi could prosper by playing nicely within the new rules, or lose his position within al-Qaida entirely. Finally, to ensure his accord was adhered to peacefully, Zawahiri dispatched an emissary, Abu Khalid al-Suri, in whom he vested the power to resolve any further disputes.

One former senior member of ISI who did not want to be named told the Guardian that Baghdadi was incensed by Zawahiri’s letter: he was shocked to be treated as an equal to Joulani and ordered to stay out of the Syrian conflict into which he had invested so much. According to Maqdisi, Baghdadi contemptuously dismissed Zawahiri’s envoy. “Suri told Baghdadi, if you stick to these points and you go back to Iraq, I will not make this order public,” Maqdisi said. “Instead, Isis refused the orders, and then started attacking Zawahiri – saying, ‘Al-Qaida is gone, it’s burned out.’”

After Suri made good on the threat to go public with Zawahiri’s humiliating diktat – which was released to al-Jazeera in June – Baghdadi issued his own blunt and unbending reply: “As long as we have a pulse or an eye that blinks,” he said, Isis was there to stay. It was the first time a major al-Qaida figure had ever publicly defied the organisation’s leader. “That was an alarm bell,” Abu Qatada recalled.

That summer, Isis began preparing for war: swelling its ranks and readying itself to claim back Syrian territory from Nusra, which it believed was rightly its own. In an astonishing series of prison breaks, it freed hundreds of Iraq’s most dangerous inmates by firing mortar rounds at walls and using car bombs to blow apart entrances. According to secret documents recently obtained by Der Spiegel, Isis also began implementing plans to take advantage of the stream of thousands of men who were flooding into Syria from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Europe. Without ties to native Syrians, these foreign fighters were likely to remain loyal. And they needed to be loyal, because instead of fighting Assad – as they had come to Syria to do – they would be used to stab the homegrown anti-Assad rebel groups in the back.

* * *

One of Maqdisi’s close associates in Jordan is a man who we will call Raheem, a personal aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who helped found the organisation that evolved into Isis – and who had an inside view of the group’s transformation after Baghdadi took power. A hulking figure, standing at more than 6ft 4in, he appeared suddenly one day at Maqdisi’s house, after hearing a rumour that Isis followers had assaulted his sheikh. In an interview a few weeks later, Raheem described the men running Isis as a different breed from the religiously inspired jihadis of al-Qaida; in fact, he said, the group had been run for several years by men who once served Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime.

According to Raheem, when Zarqawi was in charge, it was his unofficial policy to shut out anyone from the secular nationalist Ba’ath party. Zarqawi firmly believed that Iraqis in general, and Ba’athists in particular, lacked piety. Under Hussein, Iraq had been a secular


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state, and Islamism – the body of intellectual work that has turned Islam from a religion into a full-blown system of governance – had been brutally suppressed. “There were very few Iraqis who were exposed to other ideas,” Raheem said. “They were nationalists and were highly influenced by the Ba’ath.”

After Zarqawi’s death in 2006, ISI was almost destroyed by US forces and Sunni tribes revolting against its brutal violence. To save themselves, Raheem said, ISI’s inner circle decided that the group needed to broaden its ranks: revolutionary Islamist credentials were no longer essential – if you could recite a few lines of the Qur’an and grow a beard, you could sign up. The former Ba’athists, who had run Iraq for decades, were invaluable new recruits: Hussein’s former military officers knew the vulnerabilities of the Iraqi army; his former intelligence officials knew the power brokers in each town and village. Since the regime’s overthrow, these men had lost their incomes and their authority; now the Islamic State of Iraq would serve as a vehicle for them to regain their status. (Documents obtained by Der Spiegel have revealed the major role played by a former colonel in Hussein’s air intelligence service, known as Haji Bakr, who is said to have been the architect of Isis’s takeover of northern Syria; according to Raheem, he brought an entire Ba’athist unit with him when he joined the group.)

Raheem alleged that it was largely these men – former Ba’athists who became senior members of ISI – who nominated Baghdadi as the organisation’s new leader in 2010. Until his appointment, Raheem said, Baghdadi was regarded as a minor figure, quiet and uncharismatic. He had no military experience, and his scholarship was of little note, though he held a PhD in Islamic studies. But he made the ideal front man: on paper, at least, he was a religious scholar; his family claimed to be descended from the prophet Muhammad; and most importantly of all, he was not himself a Ba’athist.

After Baghdadi’s appointment, ISI’s inner circle closed ranks around its chosen leader. It discontinued all but the most cursory communication with al-Qaida central, and slowly, the few remaining senior figures considered loyal to Zawahiri were either deliberately sidelined or killed off on the battlefield. By the time Zawahiri’s fateful letter arrived in May 2013, Raheem said, there was not a single person in Isis’s senior leadership who had once belonged to al-Qaida.

Later that year, while the rest of the world was fixated on Assad’s chemical weapons, Isis planned to seize control of the 500-mile border between Turkey and Syria: if it could hold the border crossings, which supplied the main rebel groups with food, medicine, weapons and new recruits, Isis would have Nusra and its other rivals by the throat. By December, strategically important border towns began to fall, one by one, to Isis fighters. Isis fighters rode into towns whose freedom from Assad had been won at great cost, stripped factories bare, and turfed out – or killed – other fighters and their families. They kidnapped high-level commanders from other rebel groups, and murdered Syrian civilians who had been involved in the earliest mass protests against Assad, calculating that these were the only people brave enough to confront Isis in the future.

In December 2013, Hussein Suleiman, a handsome young physician who was also a senior officer of the Islamic Front rebel group, was sent to make peace with a local Isis unit after trouble broke out at a checkpoint near Lake Assad in eastern Syria. When Suleiman did not return to base, Islamic Front officials contacted Isis, which confirmed they were holding him prisoner as a spy. Outraged, the Islamic Front demanded his release. Surely Isis could not go


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around arresting peace brokers? At the very least, they asked that his crimes be tried in an independent sharia court. Isis refused.

When Isis released Suleiman as part of a prisoner exchange on 31 December, the Islamic Front received a mutilated corpse: his right ear had been cut off, his teeth were knocked out, one of his legs had been broken. The young doctor had been tortured, and the top of his head was blown off. The next day, the Islamic Front posted pictures of his mangled body online, next to those of how he used to look. They spread rapidly on social media and sparked protests in towns across Syria against Isis brutality. In Isis-controlled towns, fighters shot at the protesters, fuelling more outrage.

Within days, Syria’s major rebel groups – including Nusra, the country’s al-Qaida affiliate – banded together to declare war on Isis. Thousands of militants were killed over the first few months of 2014, as battles raged between Isis and the other rebel factions, with senior commanders on both sides kidnapped, tortured and murdered. As their positions were overrun, Isis was forced to retreat from western Syria. It began consolidating its control over the east, the area closest to Iraq, and the location of many of Syria’s oil fields. There, Nusra and Isis fought viciously, in and around the city of Raqqa and along the banks of the Euphrates.

On 16 January 2014, Zawahiri’s envoy, Abu Khalid al-Suri, published a message online. He tweeted that Isis was seeking to corrupt the jihad as it had done in Iraq: militants should direct their bombs at the infidels, he declared, not at their fellow jihadis. Seventeen days later, Zawahiri played his final card: Isis was expelled from al-Qaida.

For Isis, there was no turning back. To make clear that reconciliation was off the table, they sent their former boss a message that he would not forget. On 21 February, five men fought their way into the compound in Aleppo where Suri was staying. When their target appeared, one of the attackers detonated his suicide vest. Zawahiri’s loyal servant, who had been sent from Afghanistan to make peace, now lay dead.

* * *

From their jail cells in Jordan, Abu Qatada and Maqdisi watched the vicious struggle between Isis and al-Qaida with growing concern. For Abu Qatada, it felt like history was repeating itself. In the early 1990s, he had been a fervent supporter of the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) – issuing fatwas that gave GIA terrorists license to kill with little discrimination. But when the GIA inevitably began murdering rival militants, Abu Qatada assembled a group of radical scholars to denounce the organisation, helping to strip it of intellectual credibility among fellow jihadis. Now, more than 20 years later, he wanted Maqdisi to join him in a similar campaign against Isis – to publicly shame the group as extremists acting outside the accepted rules of jihad.

Maqdisi asked Abu Qatada to hold off. He still hoped that Isis could be brought back within the fold. Some of Isis’s most senior members had already written to him in prison signalling their contrition. One letter said: “We know that we have made mistakes … We know that among our soldiers and clerics there are some who are extremists … But they are the minority.” (It was signed: “Your son, one of the sharia legislators for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria written by request and on behalf of some of his brothers.”) With the right plan for reconciliation, Maqdisi believed that unity might be restored.



Using intermediaries to keep Zawahiri informed of his attempts at arbitration, Maqdisi reached out to Isis’s inner circle in late 2013, approaching one of his former students, a young Bahraini named Turki Binali. Binali had been his protege – a pupil of “extraordinary passion”, in Maqdisi’s words. Some nicknamed him “Maqdisi junior”. After joining Isis, Binali rapidly rose into its highest ranks: he was appointed as Baghdadi’s official biographer, and by spring 2014, he had been named Isis’s chief “scholar at arms”. In theory, a single decree from Binali’s pen could end the civil war between Isis and al-Qaida.

Maqdisi, who dispatched two of his own students to meet Binali in person, said that their initial exchanges were encouraging: he warned Binali that unless Isis was willing to negotiate an end to the conflict with al-Qaida, the group risked condemnation from the world’s most eminent jihadi sheikhs. In response, Binali assured his “beloved teacher” that Baghdadi wanted nothing more than to reach agreement with al-Qaida. But as months passed, and the fighting continued, Maqdisi came to believe Binali had little intention of settling the feud.

How, Binali asked Maqdisi, could Zawahiri have praised the Arab Spring when the people who had risen up in Egypt and elsewhere were calling for democracy, not sharia? Why, he asked, did Zawahiri refer respectfully to the US president as “Mr Obama”? Perhaps, Binali intimated, al-Qaida had decided to quit the jihad and settle into a quieter existence as a peaceful organisation? Maqdisi thought these questions were “absurd”, he said – “meaningless, insignificant points”, which Isis had “never mentioned in the past”.

By spring 2014, communications between student and teacher had seriously deteriorated; at one point, Binali slighted Maqdisi by suggesting that old age had confused him. After drafting a short online article entitled “My former Sheikh”, Binali stopped replying altogether. On 26 May 2014, Maqdisi deemed the negotiations dead and, backed by his fellow al-Qaida ideologues, issued a fatwa against Isis.

“It has become necessary that we tell the truth, after we exhausted all the possibilities of advice and all hopes of making Isis return to the path of truth,” Maqdisi wrote. The rebellious organisation, he declared, had no “Islamic pretext”. Baghdadi, his commanders, and their religious officials were “deviants” who had “disobeyed the orders of their leaders and head scholars”. He instructed Isis’s soldiers to defect to the Nusra Front, and decreed that no Islamic website should host Isis messages.

This was a serious threat to Isis’s legitimacy, and even its future. According to a series of detailed leaks from an anonymous Twitter account – much of which the Guardian has subsequently verified – Binali approached Baghdadi with a stark appraisal of Isis’s vulnerable position. The caliphate would eventually collapse, he said, if the jihad’s leading scholars and veterans continued to stand against Isis. The project could not be sustained unless Isis recruited influential supporters.

Binali’s solution to this problem was simple: if Isis could not win support, it would buy it. In the summer and autumn of 2014, messages were sent to Maqdisi, Abu Qatada and about a dozen other top-ranking clerics, inviting them to relocate to the caliphate, where they could work without fear of imprisonment. (Baghdadi even wrote a personal letter to Maqdisi to persuade him to come). To sweeten the deal, payments of up to $1m were promised. Binali also sent word to al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen that Isis would offer its leader and his men



$10m to publicly pledge allegiance to Baghdadi; a similar offer, for $5m, was made to the al-Qaida affiliate in Libya.

Binali’s scheme had mixed results. Maqdisi, Qatada and the other prominent scholars rejected the offer out of hand, as did Yemen’s al-Qaida commander. But Binali appeared to have captured the interest of several jihadi factions across the globe. In November, Isis trumpeted public oaths of loyalty from jihadi militants in Egypt, Libya, Pakistan and even Yemen, al-Qaida’s strongest redoubt. Suddenly, the group’s influence was extending beyond Syria and Iraq, into the rest of the Islamic world.

Dr Munif Samara, the jihadi doctor and close associate of Maqdisi and Abu Qatada. Photograph: Mustafa Khalili

There would be other exchanges between Maqdisi and Binali later that year, including a failed attempt to secure the release of the Isis hostage Peter Kassig. Their final communication came not long after Kassig’s execution, when Maqdisi once again found himself mediating with Isis. On 24 December 2014, a Jordanian military aircraft was shot down over Isis territory near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, and its pilot taken hostage; Maqdisi heard the news when the prison imam dedicated a prayer to the man. Soon after, Maqdisi sounded out Jordanian officials about an idea, originally suggested by his friend Dr Munif Samara, to secure the return of the pilot. Although Jordanian officials were wary, believing that the pilot could have been killed already, they authorised the plan.

Communicating primarily via Telegram messenger, an app that allows for encrypted communications, Maqdisi sent word to Isis in January of this year that the Jordanians would be willing to conduct a prisoner swap: in return for the pilot, they would release a woman named Sajida al-Rishawi. In 2005, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had sent al-Rishawi and her husband on a mission to Jordan, where they were to explode bomb belts at the Radisson SAS hotel as part of a coordinated series of suicide bombings. Rishawi’s device did not detonate, and she was arrested, languishing on death row for the next decade. In his approach to Isis, Maqdisi said, he reminded the group’s senior leaders that, as the inheritors of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s legacy, they had an obligation to save her now.

Although Maqdisi is not certain about who he was communicating with, he has no doubt that his messages were being relayed to the most senior members of Isis, including Baghdadi himself. The initial response was positive: Maqdisi says he was told that Isis were “eager” to make the trade. On social media, Isis supporters suddenly began calling for al-Rishawi’s release.

Before any deal could be brokered, the Jordanians instructed Maqdisi to obtain proof that the pilot was still alive. In response, the Isis negotiators sent Maqdisi an electronic file that they claimed would provide proof of life – but the file was password protected.

On 3 February, after a few days of tense dialogue, the negotiators finally sent Maqdisi the password to unlock the file. When he received it, Maqdisi realised he had been betrayed: the password, in Arabic, was “Maqdisi the pimp, the sole of the tyrant’s shoe, son of the English whore.”




After he typed it in, one humiliating character at a time, a video appeared on Maqdisi’s screen. He watched in horror as Isis soldiers muscled the pilot into a cage, doused him in petrol, and burned him alive. Three hours later, Isis posted the video on the internet. The next day, Sajida al-Rishawi was taken from her cell and executed.

* * *

At his house on the outskirts of Zarqa, about 25km from Amman, Maqdisi keeps a large model boat on top of one of his overstuffed bookshelves. It’s a strange object to find there: Islamic extremists are not known for their maritime collectibles. The boat was a gift from a very senior member of Isis, who built it from pencils and matchsticks while incarcerated in Abu Ghraib. Above the boat’s sails hangs a banner that reads “Journey with us,” a quotation from the Quranic retelling of the story of the flood, when Noah reaches out to beckon his son aboard. For Maqdisi, it is a symbol of salvation and unity. “It’s meant as a message for all Muslims,” he said – one with a special significance for jihadis today, as the factional bloodshed rages on.

Maqdisi and Abu Qatada continue to hope that the unity that once prevailed under bin Laden will return – but they admitted openly that Isis is winning the war on the ground and the propaganda struggle alike. “It’s a fluid state of affairs,” Abu Qatada suggested hopefully. “At the moment, Isis are drunk on power.” But at some point, he believes, they will need to negotiate with al-Qaida again. He pointed out that al-Qaida’s branch in Syria had achieved some recent successes against Assad’s forces, while Maqdisi observed that there were several other branches, including the one in Yemen, whose allegiance remains unquestioned. “Its loyalty is strong and clear,” Maqdisi said. “When Zawahiri sends a message to Yemen, he knows his orders will be obeyed.”

But the two men believe that the events of the past decade – and especially the war with Isis – are a sign that al-Qaida needs to reappraise its tactics. Maqdisi believes that al-Qaida should no longer aim to recruit followers in large numbers; it needs “people of quality”, he said, who thoroughly understand Islamic scholarship, and will not merely deploy it in the furtherance of their own personal ends.

In recent years, Maqdisi has even come to believe that al-Qaida’s conception of jihad – one licensed in part by his own scholarship – may have been incorrect, a jihad of “spite” rather than “empowering believers”. Even the attacks of 9/11, Maqdisi said, were part of a misguided strategy. “The actions in New York and Washington, no matter how great they appeared to be – the bottom line is they were spiteful.”

Maqdisi now wants al-Qaida to begin providing social services, as Hamas has done in Gaza. “That kind of enabling jihad will establish our Islamic state. It will enable it to become a place of refuge for the weak,” he said. Al-Qaida branches in Tunisia and elsewhere have been putting this suggestion into practice – with jihadis guarding hospitals, building infrastructure, and even picking up litter. And yet, as one al-Qaida veteran who did not want to be named told the Guardian, local commanders have reported that their soldiers are impatient with these new duties; many would prefer for Zawahiri to swear allegiance to Baghdadi.

Munif Samara, the jihadi doctor and close associate of Maqdisi and Abu Qatada, worried that al-Qaida may be crippled by its difficulty attracting new recruits. Young soldiers, he said,


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“want action, they want blood, they want explosions. They are sitting in their countries, and either they will be in jail or something like this, and they are waiting for al-Qaida [to do something], and al-Qaida is doing nothing.” For these young men, the lure of Isis is strong.

Al-Qaida has long maintained that while the establishment of the caliphate is the ultimate goal, conditions are not yet right: ordinary Muslims need to be educated about “true Islam” for many more years before it can return. But it has now been a year since Baghdadi declared his own caliphate – and the longer that Isis can hold its territory and broadcast its military successes to the world, the more credibility it will steal from al-Qaida.

As ideologues steeped in almost 1,400 years of Islamic scholarship, Maqdisi and Abu Qatada tend to the long view – for them, the proper perspective on al-Qaida’s present crisis is one of decades rather than months, which may explain their relative optimism about its possibility for renewal. For now, however, their fierce attacks on Isis have done little to halt its advances. Given the group’s ruthlessness and disdain for criticism, it is hard not to imagine, as one walks away from Maqdisi’s house, that if the war continues, it may not be long before he and Abu Qatada find themselves in the crosshairs.
