Loveday Morris
By Loveday Morris, Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet
Shortly before its operatives killed 14 Iraqi Shia children in a school bombing this month, the group once known as Al Qaeda in Iraq sent guerrillas into northern Syrian villages with orders to reopen local Sunni classrooms. In a series of early fall visits, the militants handed out religious textbooks along with backpacks bearing the group’s new name: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
A four-hour drive to the east, a rival Al Qaeda faction called Jabhat Al Nusra was busy setting up a jobs program in Ash-Shaddadi, a desert town it has held since February. The Islamists restarted production in an oil field that had been idled by fighting, and fired up the town’s natural gas plant, now a source of income for the town and its new rulers.
The two rebel groups, with their distinct lineages to the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden, have concentrated Western fears of rising jihadist influences within Syria’s rebel movement. Two and a half years after the start of the country’s uprising, Islamists are carving out fiefdoms and showing signs of digging in.
“We all have the same aqidah [Islamic creed] as Al Nusra or the Islamic State,” said a 23-year-old Jordanian Palestinian who gave the name Abu Abdallah in an interview in Jordan and who fights for a rebel brigade allied with the Islamists. “The aim is to free the Muslim lands and have the Islamic flag there.”
The prominence of the two groups — as fighters, as recruiters and, more recently, as local administrators — appears to have accelerated even as the Obama administration seeks to bolster moderate and secularist rebels with new weapons and training. Multiple independent studies as well as Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials show the hard-line Islamists surging ahead by almost every measure, undermining Western efforts to find a democratic alternative to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The Al Qaeda affiliates have clashed with other rebel groups, and occasionally with each other, and their heavy use of foreign fighters and attempts to impose an ultra-conservative ideology have alienated some Syrians accustomed to secular rule.
“The situation is so bad,” said Mohammed Abdelaziz, an activist in the city of Raqqa who says the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — popularly known as ISIS — criminalised the use of tobacco and carried out public executions. “A lot of people have just escaped the city, and many more are planning to.” But other Syrians have embraced the jihadists and welcomed the return of civil order in towns devastated by months of fighting.
In the competition for local sympathies, the advantage so far belongs to Jabhat Al Nusra, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq that has publicly aligned itself with Ayman Al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s longtime deputy and his successor as the leader of Al Qaeda. Since its founding early last year as a Syrian rebel group, Jabhat Al Nusra has played down its connections to the international terrorist movement while seeking to limit collateral damage from the suicide attacks and roadside bombings that are its preferred weapons against Syrian government forces.
A much harder challenge confronts ISIS — the rebranded terrorist group behind a campaign of savage attacks on Shia markets, schools and villages in neighbouring Iraq. The group’s 8,000-strong Syrian contingent boasts a larger proportion of foreign jihadists than any other rebel group, according to analysts. In just six months of operations in the country, it has managed to frighten and enrage Syrians with its extreme interpretation of Islam — including beatings and executions for perceived religious infractions.
Yet in recent weeks ISIS, too, has sought to reform its image by reopening schools and delivering food, medicine and energy to war-weary towns and villages. It has sponsored ice-cream eating contests and tug-of-war competitions for children and built training camps where teens learn fighting skills and participate in singalongs calling for the destruction of Assad and his allies, the “lowlifes and infidels.”
Some Syrians who disapprove of ISIS’s religious zeal said they applauded the arrival of the disciplined, battle-hardened force if it could shift the momentum in a fight that has appeared deadlocked for months.
“If the Islamic State were organised and didn’t interfere in people’s lives, we would welcome them,” said Mahmoud Al Hassan, a 30-year-old trader from Aleppo, who was visiting a hospital in neighbouring Turkey after his cousin was shot by a sniper.
To Western governments, however, the jihadists’ entrenched position in Syria is another ominous turn in the conflict. US and Middle Eastern officials say the two are a magnet for much of the foreign cash as well as the majority of the foreign fighters streaming into Syria.
But what troubles Western observers is not the groups’ fighting prowess, but their shared vision of a jihad that extends beyond Assad’s ouster. While other rebels fight to remove the Syrian dictator, former and current US and Middle Eastern officials say, the Al Qaeda groups are transforming the conflict into a symbolic struggle against the West and Israel, using words and images that resonate with like-minded Muslims, from the Arab Peninsula to Western Europe.
The formal titles adopted by both Al Qaeda groups include the Arabic term for greater Syria — Al Sham — that radical Islamists use to link their movement to the ancient Islamic caliphate that ruled a vast swath of the Middle East, with Damascus as its capital. Its use, the jihadists say, evokes an image of a future Middle East in which present-day boundaries and governments have been replaced by a single Islamic state, encompassing the territories of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Israel.
It is the groups’ appeal to a greater jihad that explains why foreign volunteers continue streaming into Syria in numbers that surpass those seen during earlier conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser on the Middle East to four US administrations.
“Syria has become the most important destination for aspiring jihadists ever, because it is the heart of the Muslim world on the border of Palestine,” said Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “For jihadists, it is the road to Jerusalem at last.”
To terrorism experts, it was inevitable that an Al Qaeda-aligned terrorist group would arise from the brutal sectarian violence of Syria’s civil war. How the conflict came to have two competing Al Qaeda factions is a story that reflects the power struggles within the jihadist movement in the decade after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Both Syrian groups trace their roots to the organisation once commonly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist faction that was founded by the Jordanian Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and notorious for a string of beheadings and spectacular bombings during the US occupation of Iraq. After Zarqawi’s death in 2006, the organisation was nearly destroyed through a combination of US military pressure and a near-universal rejection of its tactics by Iraqi Sunni Muslims.
The group changed its name after Zarqawi’s death, becoming the “Islamic State of Iraq,” but it never fully recovered. Only a handful of cells remained active in Iraq when the start of the Syrian uprising offered a chance for the group to reassert itself, on a different stage.
The Islamic State sent a stream of operatives into Syria in the early months of the uprising, and then, in early 2012, it backed the formation of new rebel group, Jabhat Al Nusra li-Ahl ash-Sham, or the Support Front for People of Greater Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad Al Golani, had been a senior member of the Iraqi terrorist organisation, and he acknowledged receiving start-up money from his comrades in Baghdad.
Zawahiri himself was called upon to mediate the dispute. The gray-bearded Egyptian issued a statement in June declaring that the two were independent branches of Al Qaeda. Then he called on both to cooperate.
Ideological spats continue on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and the two groups compete for resources.
Yet despite the leadership rift and differences over tactics, the two jihadist factions now cooperate more often than they clash, according to US and Middle Eastern experts who have studied both groups. In some contested cites, such as Aleppo, the two groups fight as separate entities, sometimes coordinating tactics.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Loveday Morris, Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet
Shortly before its operatives killed 14 Iraqi Shia children in a school bombing this month, the group once known as Al Qaeda in Iraq sent guerrillas into northern Syrian villages with orders to reopen local Sunni classrooms. In a series of early fall visits, the militants handed out religious textbooks along with backpacks bearing the group’s new name: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
A four-hour drive to the east, a rival Al Qaeda faction called Jabhat Al Nusra was busy setting up a jobs program in Ash-Shaddadi, a desert town it has held since February. The Islamists restarted production in an oil field that had been idled by fighting, and fired up the town’s natural gas plant, now a source of income for the town and its new rulers.
The two rebel groups, with their distinct lineages to the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden, have concentrated Western fears of rising jihadist influences within Syria’s rebel movement. Two and a half years after the start of the country’s uprising, Islamists are carving out fiefdoms and showing signs of digging in.
“We all have the same aqidah [Islamic creed] as Al Nusra or the Islamic State,” said a 23-year-old Jordanian Palestinian who gave the name Abu Abdallah in an interview in Jordan and who fights for a rebel brigade allied with the Islamists. “The aim is to free the Muslim lands and have the Islamic flag there.”
The prominence of the two groups — as fighters, as recruiters and, more recently, as local administrators — appears to have accelerated even as the Obama administration seeks to bolster moderate and secularist rebels with new weapons and training. Multiple independent studies as well as Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials show the hard-line Islamists surging ahead by almost every measure, undermining Western efforts to find a democratic alternative to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The Al Qaeda affiliates have clashed with other rebel groups, and occasionally with each other, and their heavy use of foreign fighters and attempts to impose an ultra-conservative ideology have alienated some Syrians accustomed to secular rule.
“The situation is so bad,” said Mohammed Abdelaziz, an activist in the city of Raqqa who says the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — popularly known as ISIS — criminalised the use of tobacco and carried out public executions. “A lot of people have just escaped the city, and many more are planning to.” But other Syrians have embraced the jihadists and welcomed the return of civil order in towns devastated by months of fighting.
In the competition for local sympathies, the advantage so far belongs to Jabhat Al Nusra, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq that has publicly aligned itself with Ayman Al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s longtime deputy and his successor as the leader of Al Qaeda. Since its founding early last year as a Syrian rebel group, Jabhat Al Nusra has played down its connections to the international terrorist movement while seeking to limit collateral damage from the suicide attacks and roadside bombings that are its preferred weapons against Syrian government forces.
A much harder challenge confronts ISIS — the rebranded terrorist group behind a campaign of savage attacks on Shia markets, schools and villages in neighbouring Iraq. The group’s 8,000-strong Syrian contingent boasts a larger proportion of foreign jihadists than any other rebel group, according to analysts. In just six months of operations in the country, it has managed to frighten and enrage Syrians with its extreme interpretation of Islam — including beatings and executions for perceived religious infractions.
Yet in recent weeks ISIS, too, has sought to reform its image by reopening schools and delivering food, medicine and energy to war-weary towns and villages. It has sponsored ice-cream eating contests and tug-of-war competitions for children and built training camps where teens learn fighting skills and participate in singalongs calling for the destruction of Assad and his allies, the “lowlifes and infidels.”
Some Syrians who disapprove of ISIS’s religious zeal said they applauded the arrival of the disciplined, battle-hardened force if it could shift the momentum in a fight that has appeared deadlocked for months.
“If the Islamic State were organised and didn’t interfere in people’s lives, we would welcome them,” said Mahmoud Al Hassan, a 30-year-old trader from Aleppo, who was visiting a hospital in neighbouring Turkey after his cousin was shot by a sniper.
To Western governments, however, the jihadists’ entrenched position in Syria is another ominous turn in the conflict. US and Middle Eastern officials say the two are a magnet for much of the foreign cash as well as the majority of the foreign fighters streaming into Syria.
But what troubles Western observers is not the groups’ fighting prowess, but their shared vision of a jihad that extends beyond Assad’s ouster. While other rebels fight to remove the Syrian dictator, former and current US and Middle Eastern officials say, the Al Qaeda groups are transforming the conflict into a symbolic struggle against the West and Israel, using words and images that resonate with like-minded Muslims, from the Arab Peninsula to Western Europe.
The formal titles adopted by both Al Qaeda groups include the Arabic term for greater Syria — Al Sham — that radical Islamists use to link their movement to the ancient Islamic caliphate that ruled a vast swath of the Middle East, with Damascus as its capital. Its use, the jihadists say, evokes an image of a future Middle East in which present-day boundaries and governments have been replaced by a single Islamic state, encompassing the territories of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Israel.
It is the groups’ appeal to a greater jihad that explains why foreign volunteers continue streaming into Syria in numbers that surpass those seen during earlier conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser on the Middle East to four US administrations.
“Syria has become the most important destination for aspiring jihadists ever, because it is the heart of the Muslim world on the border of Palestine,” said Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “For jihadists, it is the road to Jerusalem at last.”
To terrorism experts, it was inevitable that an Al Qaeda-aligned terrorist group would arise from the brutal sectarian violence of Syria’s civil war. How the conflict came to have two competing Al Qaeda factions is a story that reflects the power struggles within the jihadist movement in the decade after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Both Syrian groups trace their roots to the organisation once commonly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist faction that was founded by the Jordanian Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and notorious for a string of beheadings and spectacular bombings during the US occupation of Iraq. After Zarqawi’s death in 2006, the organisation was nearly destroyed through a combination of US military pressure and a near-universal rejection of its tactics by Iraqi Sunni Muslims.
The group changed its name after Zarqawi’s death, becoming the “Islamic State of Iraq,” but it never fully recovered. Only a handful of cells remained active in Iraq when the start of the Syrian uprising offered a chance for the group to reassert itself, on a different stage.
The Islamic State sent a stream of operatives into Syria in the early months of the uprising, and then, in early 2012, it backed the formation of new rebel group, Jabhat Al Nusra li-Ahl ash-Sham, or the Support Front for People of Greater Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad Al Golani, had been a senior member of the Iraqi terrorist organisation, and he acknowledged receiving start-up money from his comrades in Baghdad.
Zawahiri himself was called upon to mediate the dispute. The gray-bearded Egyptian issued a statement in June declaring that the two were independent branches of Al Qaeda. Then he called on both to cooperate.
Ideological spats continue on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and the two groups compete for resources.
Yet despite the leadership rift and differences over tactics, the two jihadist factions now cooperate more often than they clash, according to US and Middle Eastern experts who have studied both groups. In some contested cites, such as Aleppo, the two groups fight as separate entities, sometimes coordinating tactics.
WP-BLOOMBERG
