The ISIS Reader by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Aftermath

The response to Baghdadi’s speech was swift and its implications seismic for the global jihad. On 10 April 2013, Jawlani released an audio statement indicating that he did not have prior knowledge of Baghdadi’s decision, although he would broadly comply with it, while reaffirming his allegiance to Zawahiri’s AQ and refusing to change Jabhat al-Nusra’s name. Clearly Jawlani wanted to distinguish his organisation from ISIS and report to Zawahiri’s higher authority while remaining (perhaps begrudgingly) respectful to Baghdadi’s call. Zawahiri took almost a fortnight to respond, and when he did on 23 May 2013, he chastised both men, demanding that Baghdadi reverse ISIS’s name change and narrow its focus on Iraq while insisting that Jabhat al-Nusra was an AQ affiliate in Syria, thus, while independent, it was ultimately subordinate to his leadership.

If Zawahiri thought this would put the issue to rest he was sorely mistaken. Baghdadi and the spokesperson of ISIS’s media apparatus, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, delivered a series of scathing critiques of AQ and its leader. On 15 June 2013, Baghdadi released an audio message rejecting Zawahiri on jurisprudential and strategic grounds, and he was followed days later, on 19 June, by Adnani, who released an audio message criticizing the AQ chief.11 Indeed, Adnani would play an increasingly central role in the propaganda battle via four speeches that largely focused on defending ISIS’s manhaj while condemning AQ for its misguidance: ‘They shall by no means harm you but with a slight evil’,12 ‘This is not our methodology nor will it ever be’,13 ‘This is the promise of Allah’14 and, ‘Sorry, amir of al-Qaida’.15 During this period, ISIS increasingly augmented this campaign with messaging that highlighted its spectrum of politico-military activities and the legitimacy of its manhaj. For example, on 8 August 2013, ISIS’s al-I’tisam Media Centre released the first of a fifty-video series titled ‘A Window Upon the Land of Epic Battles’ showcasing a diverse spectrum of ISIS activities across Syria and Iraq, from tribal engagements and rule of law activities to military operations. The tit-for-tat propaganda war between ISIS and AQ led inevitably to violence between the two groups and, on 2 February 2014, AQ formally and belatedly disassociated itself from ISIS.

Ultimately, success or failure would be presented as a marker of the legitimacy and divine sanction of one group over the other. This was, after all, the metric Baghdadi had established for his own group when calling for unification and announcing ISIS. At the time of his April 2013 speech, it would have been absurd to think that, within a little over a year, ISIS would control swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, announce the establishment of its caliphate and replace AQ as the flagship of the global jihad.16 Indeed, by early January 2014, such a prospect would have seemed even more ridiculous as ISIS forces were forced to retreat eastward in Syria by a coalition of rebels while simultaneously receding westward in Iraq due to pressure from Iraqi military forces. And yet, by July of

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