Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (18 page)

A more serious development is the rapid expansion of Islamic State’s influence in other Muslim countries. In the course of late 2014 and early 2015, five Islamist fighting groups in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria and Afghanistan pledged their allegiance to the “caliphate” and at least in theory put themselves under Islamic State’s command.
Except for Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, none controlled very much territory, and two, in Yemen and Afghanistan, were recent start-ups that were overshadowed by much more powerful existing groups that were loyal to al Qaeda. Nevertheless, the tendency illustrates how quickly the Islamic State franchise is overtaking its al Qaeda rival: it has even been reported that the senior leadership of al Shabaab, the dominant Islamist group in Somalia, has debated switching the organization’s affiliation from al Qaeda to Islamic State.
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The benefits of belonging to either franchise are largely intangible. None of the IS affiliates receive any material help from the brand manager of the franchise: the parent organization’s geographical and financial isolation forbids it. They doubtless receive exhortations and instructions of a general sort from the caliph from time to time, just as al Qaeda affiliates get from Ayman al Zawahiri, but in both cases the lack of secure real-time communications means that the centre cannot exercise close supervision over the tactics or even the strategy of the affiliates. They are essentially on their own, with nothing more than moral support from head office. Within the jihadi world, however, that is very important, as it is essentially a free market in which potential recruits and donors, especially foreign ones, can choose among a wide variety of Islamist revolutionary outfits.

The differences between al Qaeda and Islamic State are significant, even if they are not all immediately visible to
the naked non-Islamist eye. The most obvious is the fact that Islamic State has actually proclaimed a caliphate and demanded the loyalty of all Sunni Muslims, including members of rival jihadi groups, on pain of being declared apostates, while al Qaeda has so far abstained from doing so. Several of al Qaeda’s affiliates, most notably al Nusra in Syria, have declared emirates, but emirates only demand the loyalty of all Sunni Muslims within the specific territory they control. Interestingly, even the United States recognizes that there is a distinction between the two: although it classifies both as “foreign terrorist organizations,” it only bombs Islamic State targets in Syria, not al Nusra assets. (However, it does bomb targets in Syria belonging to the “Khorasan Group,” which it claims is a specialized al Qaeda group based in al Nusra territory that plans attacks on Western targets. Al Nusra of course interprets this as attacks on itself, so maybe this is a distinction without much of a difference.)

There also used to be quite a contrast between the two organizations in terms of target selection. Al Qaeda was no respecter of infidel lives, and was a serial perpetrator of mass-casualty attacks that killed hundreds or thousands, inevitably including some Muslims (like those who happened to be in the Twin Towers in 2001, say, or in the streets outside the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998). But it did not specifically target Muslims, not even Shia Muslims, except on rare occasions; nor did it engage in gloating videos of beheadings, crucifixions, burning people alive
and other atrocities. Islamic State, on the other hand, slaughters Shias as a matter of policy, and it kills Sunni Muslims too if they defy its authority or are captured while serving the Syrian or Iraqi governments. Its slickly produced snuff videos are notorious. Until recently there was a clear difference of style, and the would-be jihadi could be guided by his personal taste in these matters.

The erosion of this difference has been rapid since the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Ayman al Zawahiri, his successor, has been more tolerant of the killing of Muslims and of spectacular displays of deliberate cruelty, or at least less diligent in restraining the various affiliates from engaging in such behaviour. This change is probably due to the pressure of competition from Islamic State, which has been growing much faster than al Qaeda in recent years. Indeed, IS is now the larger of the two franchises, and is challenging al Qaeda even in its strongholds like Afghanistan and Yemen. It is not possible to prove that the ideological or religious differences between the two contribute to this outcome, but they probably do.

Al Qaeda and Islamic State both follow the austere and deeply conservative Salafi version of Islam, but there is a much stronger “end-times” flavour to the Islam of Islamic State. Al Qaeda under bin Laden’s leadership, and even now under Zawahiri, thinks in terms of decades, even centuries of struggle before the world Muslim community can triumph over the many separate states that divide it, institute the rule of the righteous (yes, in the form of a
restored caliphate), and return Muslims to their proper position as the leading civilization on the planet. A much longer time may be required before Islam spreads to every corner of the world, and even then the End Times may not follow at once. Al Qaeda’s adherents still live in the slow, hard world of history—whereas Islamic State believes that the End Times are upon us now. Indeed, it believes that it can be the force that triggers the sequence of events that, according to the prophecies, will lead directly to the end of the world. So for impressionable young men who want to play a key role in bringing about the end of history, Islamic State is obviously the franchise of choice.

Al Qaeda’s other drawback in the competition with Islamic State is that it lacks a strong territorial base in the Arab world: Zawahiri and most of the senior leadership are still living in hiding, mostly in Afghanistan or Pakistan. On the other hand, it has no current pretentions to being the caliphate, which means that candidate franchises are not required to pledge unquestioning loyalty to Zawahiri, and that helps to keep it in the running. The line-up of the two teams, as of the time of writing in mid-2015, is as follows:

For Islamic State:

In Egypt
, Ansar Beit al Maqdis (Supporters of the Holy House), based primarily in the northern part of the Sinai peninsula. It launches attacks on the Egyptian army, assassinates Egyptian government officials, bombs pipelines,
and occasionally launches rockets from Sinai against Israel. When it pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi (“Caliph Ibrahim”) in November 2014, it was officially renamed Wilayat Sinai (Sinai Province), in accordance with Islamic State policy on the names of member organizations. An allied group, Soldiers of Egypt, based in Cairo, concentrates on killing Egyptian policemen.

In Libya
, Islamic State in Libya consists of groups of fighters in the eastern city of Derna who came together to pledge allegiance to Islamic State in October 2014. This is the group that beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christian Egyptians on a beach in 2015, triggering Egyptian air strikes on the city. It is a relatively minor player in the many-sided competition for power in Libya.

In Nigeria
, Boko Haram (“Western Education Is Forbidden”) is numerically the biggest of Islamic State’s affiliates. Its leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to “Caliph Ibrahim” in March 2014, and the group is now formally called Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi (Province of West Africa). It has 7–10,000 core fighters, and until recently it controlled a large amount of territory in northeastern Nigeria, a mostly Muslim region of the country. Its military successes (which created 1.5 million refugees) were largely due to the extreme corruption and incompetence of the Nigerian army, which was also heavily penetrated by Boko Haram sympathizers. A joint military operation by
the Nigerian, Chadian and Cameroonian armed forces, assisted by South African mercenaries, took most of the territory back in March 2015.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan
, a breakaway splinter group from the Taliban calling itself the Khorasan Province (Wilayat Khorasan) of Islamic State emerged quite recently and has engaged in firefights with Taliban forces and bombing attacks against the civilian population. It is widely suspected of getting material support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which can use it as a counter-weight to the Taliban if the latter organization becomes more resistant to the ISI’s plans for Afghanistan. Despite its public declaration of allegiance to Islamic State, it is not known whether “Khorasan Province” is in contact with Islamic State headquarters in Syria.

In Yemen
, Wilayat Sana’a of Islamic State announced its presence in March 2015 by attacking two Shia mosques in Sana’a. It is very much a start-up organization in a market long dominated by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and its growth prospects are poor.

In the Philippines
, the leader of Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamist group in the southwest of the country, was the first foreign jihadi leader to pledge allegiance to Islamic State and its “caliph” in July 2014. It is very unlikely that he gets orders or financial support from IS.

For al Qaeda:

In Syria
, the Nusra Front is al Qaeda’s biggest and most successful operation. It was acquired from Islamic State in 2013 after its leader in Syria, Abu Muhammad al Golani, broke away rather than allow al Nusra to be reabsorbed by its parent organization, then known as Islamic State in Iraq. Al Nusra controls all of Idlib province in the northwest and much territory in the south between Damascus and the Jordanian border. If the Syrian regime were to collapse, it could provide a territorial base for al Qaeda in western Syria comparable to the one that Islamic State enjoys in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

In Somalia
, al Shabaab, the dominant Islamist organization in that country, is al Qaeda’s second-biggest franchise. It once controlled most of southern Somalia, but military offensives by a 22,000-man African Union force drawn mainly from Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia have now substantially reduced its territory. It nevertheless remains capable of carrying out regular terrorist attacks in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and also in Kenyan towns and cities.

In Yemen
, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) conquered most of the country’s eastern provinces in March and April 2015, taking advantage of the war between Houthi rebels who controlled most of western Yemen, the densely populated agricultural heartland of the country,
and a Saudi-led coalition that was bombing them. It now controls about half of Yemen’s territory, but less than a tenth of its population. Its Saudi Arabian branch has been savagely suppressed. It is now the largest source of terrorist attacks against Western countries, and took credit for the Paris attack on
Charlie Hebdo
in January 2015.

In North Africa
, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is an Algerian-based group descended from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a faction of the Armed Islamic Group, which was the largest and most active Islamist group in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s. It was subsequently reduced to only about a thousand men by the Algerian government’s counter-terror operations, but it has recovered to a degree and was very active in northern Mali in alliance with the Tuareg separatist movement in 2011–12. It has recently expanded into Tunisia and Libya.

It will be clear from these summaries that al Qaeda still has more powerful affiliates but that Islamic State has the momentum. It should also be stressed that other Islamist groups continue to operate outside the franchises. The most powerful Islamist groups in Libya are linked closely to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In Afghanistan, al Qaeda was once closely allied to the Taliban, and links remain today, although the relationship has grown much cooler, but the Taliban were never an affiliate of al Qaeda. Neither
were Tehriki-Taliban (the “Pakistani Taliban”) nor Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in Pakistan.

The rivalry between al Qaeda and Islamic State has already erupted into open warfare twice: in Syria in the first four months of 2014 and in Yemen in the spring of 2015. While a degree of tactical cooperation persists, further clashes seem likely. The chances are slim that they will overrun the Arab world any time soon. Or indeed ever.

CHAPTER 10

THE LESSER EVIL

Q: [Why is Islamic State] not fighting Israel but instead shedding the blood of the sons of Iraq and Syria?

A: The greater answer is in the noble Quran, when Allah Almighty speaks about the near enemy. In the majority of verses in the noble Quran, these are the hypocrites, for they pose a greater danger than the original infidels [those who were not born Muslims, like Jews and Christians]. And the answer is found in Abu Bakr al-Sadiq, when he preferred fighting apostates over the conquest of Jerusalem, which was conquered by his successor, Omar al-Khattab
.