ji·had·ica

Turning the volume up to 11 is not enough: Why counter-strategies have to target extremist clusters

On Tuesday, February 3rd,  the al-Furqan Media Institute, the official media outlet of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) released a new video by the title Shifa’ al-sudur. Ali Fisher, Resident Data Scientist at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos and Nico Prucha, Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College, analyse the extremist data flow and briefly some elements of the video to initiate a new series on Jihadica. Following a common and yet new modus operandi, the video was announced first as a forthcoming release on Tuesday morning via Twitter and released hours later. New jihad videos are oftentimes announced hours or days before actually being released. The first tweet, as described below, was published by a high profile account that is, however, not an official IS Twitter handle. The ‘official’ IS Twitter handles have been removed mostly

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Nico Prucha February 9, 2015

Battlefield Yemen: The Islamic State’s Challenge to AQAP

Since the caliphate declaration of late June 2014, Yemen has emerged a key battleground in the intra-jihadi struggle pitting the Islamic State against al-Qaeda. The country hosts what is arguably al-Qaeda’s most prestigious affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). But as far as the Islamic State is concerned, that organization ceased to exist when the caliphate was declared. Thereafter all jihadi groups were expected to dissolve themselves and incorporate within the all-supreme caliphate. Preemptive bay‘a In mid-November, the Islamic State, driving home this point, officially declared its “expansion” to Yemen, among other target countries, proclaiming “the dissolution of the names of the groups in them and declaring them to be new provinces of the Islamic State.” A series of bay‘as— statements of allegiance to Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—were issued simultaneously on November 10 from Yemen, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria. Three days later, Baghdadi “accepted” the pledges, conferring on

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Cole Bunzel December 12, 2014

A Jihadi Civil War of Words: The Ghuraba’ Media Foundation and Minbar al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad

Amid the ongoing conflict between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, jihadi ideologues and media appear more divided than ever before. Notwithstanding U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that some thought could unite jihadi ranks, the jihadi civil war is raging on unabated, and nowhere more so than on the ideological and media front. Among more traditional media, it is now the norm for jihadi web forums to identify—even openly—with one belligerent or the other. Some forums, such as Platform Media and Tahaddi, promote the Islamic State, with Shumukh more or less also on board; Fida’ and ‘Arin, among others, clearly favor al-Qaeda. Yet the real jihadi battle of wits is not being waged on or between the forums. The ideological battlefield is defined, rather, by a number of upstart media outlets on Twitter supportive of the Islamic State, on the one side, and a few established websites of older jihadi

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Cole Bunzel October 21, 2014

Al-Qaeda Revives Its Beef with the Islamic State

With the formal disavowal of the Islamic State by al-Qa`ida last February, the two groups have vied with each other for leadership of the global jihad. Combining military victories with an effective use of social media, the Islamic State has been able to gain  traction among both grassroots sympathizers and militant outfits. This has led to the emergence of a number of splinter factions that left their original groups to align with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s forces. These defections have been witnessed not only among al-Qa`ida’s affiliates but by the al-Qa`ida mothership itself in Waziristan. In light of this relative but noteworthy reshaping, some people have raised the question of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ability to maintain loyalty among his subsidiaries or even a future union between his group and al-Baghdadi’s. While it is too early to determine who will eventually call the shots, a telling audio message recently released by Abu Dujana al-Basha,

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Kévin Jackson October 15, 2014

IS’s beheadings of Western hostages: Jihadi ideologues speak out

The recent beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the British aid worker David Haines by the Islamic State (IS) have been the subject of much media attention. Some of this attention has focussed on the question of whether IS is actually “Islamic” or not. World leaders like the American President Barack Obama and the British Prime Minister David Cameron have weighed in on this question by stating, respectively, that “[IS] is not Islamic” and “they are not Muslims; they are monsters”. The shock of seeing one’s countrymen being beheaded, Obama and Cameron’s wish to distinguish between the Islamic State and Islam as a religion and the fact that it is Muslims themselves who are often the victims of IS’s policies make such statements seem obvious. Still, one may wonder whether the question “Is IS Islamic?” is really one that non-Muslim politicians such as Obama and Cameron

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Joas Wagemakers September 22, 2014

A purity contest: Abu Basir and al-Maqdisi slug it out

The policies of the Islamic State (IS) have already led to some fierce debates and scholarly disputes among radical Islamic ideologues. This post looks at one of these disputes that is interesting for various reasons, one of them being that it takes place not between proponents and opponents of IS, but between two men who are both critics of IS. Regular readers of Jihadica will recall that one of the latest developments in the discussions surrounding the Islamic State, as Cole Bunzel recently pointed out, is the Mauritanian scholar Abu l-Mundhir al-Shinqiti’s reversal on IS. Whereas al-Shinqiti used to be a strong supporter of what was then still called the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), the latter’s announcement of the caliphate apparently caused him to switch sides. As Cole pointed out, there were some doubts about the authenticity of al-Shinqiti’s critical book of the caliphate. These doubts seemed

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Joas Wagemakers September 12, 2014

Al-Qaeda’s Quasi-Caliph: The Recasting of Mullah ‘Umar

The Islamic State’s June 29 declaration of a caliphate has yet to win mass support among the global jihadi community but it has succeeded in provoking an embattled al-Qaeda leadership to respond—in unforeseen fashion. Rather than immediately denouncing the Islamic State’s new “caliphate” as one would have expected, al-Qaeda has responded in kind: that is, with the proposition of a counter-caliph of sorts. The mooted quasi-caliph is none other than Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad ‘Umar, head of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan since 1996. Like the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Mullah ‘Umar holds the title amir al-mu’minin (commander of the believers), the traditional title of caliphs in Islamic history. The Afghan amir’s title has rarely seemed more than rhetorical but over the last week al-Qaeda has played up the ambiguity of the title. It has reaffirmed its loyalty to Mullah ‘Umar and distributed a video of Osama bin Laden

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Cole Bunzel July 23, 2014

The Caliphate’s Scholar-in-Arms

With the Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or Caliph Ibrahim, seeking to displace al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri as the leader of the global jihadi movement, a parallel displacement effort is taking place in the more recondite realm of jihadi ideology. The old guard of jihadi intellectuals—Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada al-Filastini, and Hani al-Siba‘i, among others—has come out unanimously against the Islamic State and its caliphal pretensions, denouncing the “organization” as hopelessly extremist and out of touch with reality. Their reproach has left a younger generation of pro-Islamic State jihadis no choice but to take up their mantle. One in particular, decrying his jihadi elders and their fierce opposition to his beloved caliphate, appears to be peerless in this effort. He is also the Islamic State’s most prominent and prolific resident scholar, based in Syria since at least February 2014. Known previously to Jihadica readers by his pseudonym, Abu Humam al-Athari,

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Cole Bunzel July 9, 2014

The Islamic State of Disunity: Jihadism Divided

The rebel offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) in northern Syria, which broke out on January 3, 2014, has dramatically heightened tensions between Jihadi-Salafi thinkers. As noted previously, two tendencies predominate among jihadis insofar as the Syrian war is concerned: one favoring the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and cooperation with all rebel groups, and another favoring ISIS and its exclusionary political designs as the reborn Islamic state, or proto-caliphate. On the ground at least, the uprising against ISIS has not for the most part opposed the more pragmatic JN backers to the more ideological ISIS devotees. Although driven violently out of Raqqa by the Islamic State in mid-January, JN has largely stood aloof during this confrontation. Rather those arrayed against ISIS—what one jihadi author has termed “the tripartite aggression”—consist of two upstart groups, the Syria Revolutionaries’ Front and the Mujahidin Army, and the Islamic Front (IF),

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Cole Bunzel January 30, 2014

Caliphate Now: Jihadis Debate the Islamic State

Since the mid-November beheading in Aleppo of allied commander Muhammad Faris of Harakat Ahrar al-Sham, a barrage of negative media attention has afflicted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). ISIS was concerned by its public image problem even before this signal mistake. In a September statement, Islamic State official spokesman Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani defended his emirate from a perceived media onslaught, thought to be led by “the unbelieving West” and its regional allies and aimed at discrediting ISIS: playing up its feuds with other mujahidin in Syria and playing down its battlefield accomplishments. Another campaign to discredit the Islamic State, however, cannot be attributed to Western origin. It arises from within the jihadi community itself. In November the two most high-profile jihadi ideologues alive today issued searing critiques of ISIS and its emir, al-Baghdadi. Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada al-Filistini, imprisoned in Jordan in the

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Cole Bunzel November 25, 2013
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