DIVORCE
AL-QAEDA SPLITS FROM ISIS
At the end of December 2014, ISIS released its sixth issue of Dabiq. The cover story promised a “testimony from within” al-Qaeda’s home base of operations, the Waziristan region of southern Pakistan. Written by a man called Abu Jarir al-Shamali, a former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the article was a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look at the degeneration of a once noble jihadist enterprise. Al-Shamali said he traveled to Waziristan after being released from an Iranian jail in 2010. He expected to find a proud Islamic emirate: “I had thought the mujahidin were the decision makers there and that the sharia laws were implemented by them there. But alas and sadly, the dominant law was the tribal laws.” Children were attending the “secularist government” schools; paved roads indicated that Islamabad was still very much in control of the territory; and, women intermingled with men, “making the movement of the mujahid brothers difficult in the case of sudden military action.” In short, al-Qaeda’s emirate was a busted flush. Moreover, al-Shamali explained, the treachery of the mujahidin in Pakistan, principally Ayman al-Zawahiri and “his cronies who left from the arena of Waziristan carrying secret and private messages,” had created a rift within ISI, which led to a civil war within a civil war in Syria. Jabhat al-Nusra was suddenly fighting ISIS.
AL-NUSRA AT WAR IN SYRIA
By August 2012 US intelligence estimated that al-Qaeda had roughly 200 operatives in Syria, a minority of the overall rebel formations battling the regime. But, as the Associated Press reported, their “units [were] spreading from city to city, with veterans of the Iraq insurgency employing their expertise in bomb-building to carry out more than two dozen attacks so far.” And al-Zawahiri’s exhortation had paid off because, as Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official said, “There is a larger group of foreign fighters . . .who are either in or headed to Syria,” although he claimed that Western-backed rebel groups “assured us that they are being vigilant and want nothing to do with al-Qaeda or with violent extremists.”
That vigilance would be severely tested as FSA brigades and battalions continued to complain about their lack of resources relative to the jihadists. At that point, the United States was sending “non-lethal aid” to the opposition in the form of walkie-talkies, night-vision goggles, and Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). FSA fighters had to rely on whatever weapons the military defectors in their midst took with them from the Syrian army, commandeered stocks from raided regime installations, and black-market purchases where the prices of even “light” arms such as Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and ammunition had been inflated because of high demand. The rebels were also growing increasingly dependent on weapons purchased for them by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two Gulf states with antagonistic agendas and a willingness to work with Islamist fighters deemed unsavory to the West.
A little-explored facet of the Syrian Civil War was how a highly competitive bidding war for arms by fighters naturally inclined toward nationalism or secularism accelerated their radicalization, or at least their show of having been radicalized. In a survey of the opposition carried out by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Pechter Polls of Princeton in June 2012, rebels made their intentions for a post-Assad Syria clear. The survey showed that 40 percent wanted a transitional government in Damascus, leading to elections; 36 percent said they wanted a constitutional assembly, as in postrevolutionary Tunisia, leading to elections. But that would slowly change, or at least appear to. In Antakya—which by the summer of 2011 had become a refugee hub, triage center, and a remote barracks for the rebels—we met with one mainstream FSA fighter who was recuperating from an injury caused by shrapnel. He drank alcohol and smoked marijuana and professed to want to see a democratic state emerge in the wake of Assadism. However, his battlefield photo showed a long-bearded Islamic militant redolent of the Chechen separatist warlord Shamil Basayev.
This rebel’s brigade, he told us, was financed by the Muslim Brotherhood, and so he felt it necessary to play up his religiosity to ensure the subsidization of his men. Another rebel commander complained how he had to sell everything, from his family mining businesses in Hama to his wife’s jewelry, to keep his small start-up battalion of a few hundred afloat, whereas jihadist leaders were turning up in safe houses throughout Syria with bags full of cash they were ready to dispense to their comrades to buy guns, bullets, and bombs. The eight-year-old arms and jihadist trafficking nexus in eastern Syrian and western Iraq was moving in the reverse direction.
On December 11, 2012, the US Treasury Department sanctioned al-Nusra as the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda, which it accused of seeking “to exploit the instability inside Syria for its own purposes, using tactics and espousing an ideology drawn from [al-Qaeda in Iraq] that the Syrian people broadly reject.”
The designation failed to marginalize the jihadist cell. Instead, it rallied the opposition behind al-Nusra, not necessarily out of ideological sympathy but out of wartime exigency. Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian dissident who had belonged to the Syrian National Council, the first political vehicle for the opposition, called the decision misguided precisely because it seemed to certify the al-Assad regime’s portrayal of the conflict—as a war against terror. Dissidents inside Syria saw it much the same way.
Having asked for the better part of a year for US military intervention in the form of a no-fly zone or arms for the FSA, activists chafed at America’s blacklisting of one of the groups taking the fight most assiduously to their enemy. In December 2012, Syrians held one of their Friday demonstrations throughout the country. This one was titled “We are all Jabhat al-Nusra.”
ISI OWNS AL-NUSRA
As it happens, the first al-Qaeda agent to confirm the Treasury Department’s intelligence was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in an audio message publicized on April 8, 2013, more than a year after al-Nusra had established itself as one of the vanguard fighting forces. It was also a month after an array of rebel factions, led by Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra, took its first (and so far only) provincial capital away from Syrian soldiers in the eastern city of Raqqa, which was nicknamed the “hotel of the revolution” owing to the tripling of its population from internally displaced persons.
The fall of the city nearly coincided with the anniversary of another hinge moment in the history of the modern Middle East. It had been almost ten years to the day since US forces invaded Iraq in Operation Enduring Freedom. There was a grim symmetry between the two events. US Marines had famously helped local Iraqis raze a large statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Paradise Square, with one even briefly, controversially, covering the monument with the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly Islamists had just toppled a bronze statue of Hafez al-Assad and hoisted the Muslim shahada, the black flag with Arabic script reading, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger,” to a flagpole in another Arab metropolis ruled by Baathists. Within days, graffiti appeared on buildings in Raqqa, attributed to al-Nusra, warning that the punishment for theft was the loss of a hand. Pamphlets were distributed with images instructing women of the due modesty of dress expected of them. And while many residents had cheered the expulsion of the regime, not all welcomed their new masters or the divisive iconography they brought with them.
In the New Yorker, Rania Abouzeid reconstructed an intense debate had between Raqqans of all generations and an al-Nusra operative, who was handing out a leaflet explaining the necessity of replacing the Free Syrian flag—the pre-Baathist tricolor adopted by the opposition in the early months of the protest movement—with an Islamic one. Abu Noor, a man in his twenties, feared the shahada was an open invitation for the wrong kind of US intervention in Syria. “We will become a target for American drone attacks because of the flag—it’s huge,” he said. “They’ll think we’re extremist Muslims!” Abu Moayad, an older man who had helped smuggle ammunition to the rebels from Iraq, told al-Nusra that the flag denatured the first principles of the revolution: “We are not an Islamic emirate; we are part of Syria. This is a religious banner, not a country’s flag.”
ISI’s seizure of Raqqa had happened by stealth, seemingly overnight, much as its insertion of al-Nusra into all of Syria. “When the situation in Syria reached that level in terms of bloodshed and violation of honor,” al-Baghdadi declared on April 8, 2013, “and when the people of Syria asked for help and everyone abandoned them, we could not but come to their help so we appointed al-Jolani, who is one of our soldiers, along with a group of our sons, and we sent them from Iraq to Syria to meet our cells in Syria. We set plans for them and devised policies for them and we supported them with half of our treasury every month. We also provided them with men with long experience, foreigners and locals. . . .We did not announce it for security reasons and for people to know the truth about [ISI] away from media distortion, falsehood, and twisting.”
Al-Baghdadi didn’t just confine his message to confirming what was already widely assumed—he went further, announcing that al-Nusra and ISI were uniting into one cross-regional jihadist enterprise to be known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which has alternatively been translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
No thanks, came al-Jolani’s reply, two days later.
Although respectful of his Iraq-based superior, whom he referred to as “honorable sheikh,” al-Jolani said that he didn’t approve of the merger, much less know about it beforehand. He thanked ISI for sharing its straitened operating budget with the Syrian franchise and confirmed al-Baghdadi’s deputization of him to lead al-Nusra. However, al-Jolani left absolutely no doubt as to where his true loyalty lay—with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the “Sheikh of Jihad,” to whom he publicly renewed his and al-Nusra’s bayat.
What followed was a brief media intermission by al-Nusra and an attendant escalation in chatter by ISIS. Al-Nusra’s official media network, al-Manara al-Bayda (the White Lighthouse), stopped producing material, while numerous videos began to appear from ISIS, fueling speculation that al-Baghdadi had triumphed over al-Jolani. It was only in late May–early June 2013 that al-Zawahiri, like an exhausted father trying to break up a fight between two unruly sons, intervened publicly.
In a communiqué published by Al Jazeera, he did his best to sound evenhanded in his judgment. Al-Baghdadi, he stated, was “wrong when he announced the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant without asking permission or receiving advice from us and even without notifying us.” But al-Jolani, too, was “wrong by announcing his rejection to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and by showing his links to al-Qaeda without having our permission or advice, even without notifying us.” Al-Zawhiri thereby “dissolved” ISIS and ordered both ISI and al-Nusra back to its geographically delimited corners, one having control over Iraq, the other over Syria.
No doubt aware that this pronouncement wouldn’t keep his two subordinates from restarting their argument, al-Zawahiri also hedged his bets. He appointed Abu Khalid al-Suri, al-Qaeda’s “delegate” in Syria, to act as an on-the-ground arbiter of any further squabbles that might arise from his decree. Also, in the event that al-Nusra attacked ISI or vice versa, al-Zawahiri empowered al-Suri to “set up a Sharia justice court for giving a ruling on the case.”
Al-Suri, who was killed in a suicide bombing in Aleppo in February 2014 (possibly at the hands of ISIS), was a veteran al-Qaeda agent, not to mention another beneficiary of al-Assad’s general amnesty in 2011. He had helped found Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Movement of the Free Men of the Levant), one of the most powerful rebel groups in Syria today. Before his death, al-Suri was the linchpin of the long-standing operational alliance between al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.
AL-ZAWAHIRI, DEFENDER OF SYKES-PICOT
Al-Zawahiri’s suspicion that the crisis between his two field commanders would outlast his paternal intervention proved correct. Al-Baghdadi refused to abide by his edict and justified his defiance by claiming that al-Zawahiri, by insisting on a distinction between the lands of Syria and Iraq, was deferring to artificial state borders drawn up by Western imperial powers at the close of the First World War, specifically the Sykes-Picot Agreement. That was no mild charge to level at the Sheikh of Jihad.
The brainchild of Sir Mark Sykes, the secretive twentieth-century compact between London and Paris had divided the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk,” Sykes told the British cabinet in December 1915. In reality, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was never implemented as it was originally envisaged: Mosul, for instance, was meant to fall to France’s sphere of influence but in the end became part of the British mandate in Iraq. But despite being drawn along Ottoman boundaries more than one hundred years old, the pact has become a compelling complaint for successive generations of Baathists, Communists, pan-Arab nationalists, and Islamists. The agreement was, and still is, a synecdoche for conniving and duplicitous Western designs on the Middle East, so much so, in fact, that when ISIS stormed Mosul in June 2014 and bulldozed the berms dividing Iraq from Syria, it billed the act as both the physical and symbolic repudiation of Sykes-Picot. Implicitly, too, it was a rejection of al-Zawahiri’s prescription for holy war. Al-Baghdadi’s break with the Egyptian elder was therefore more than that of a lieutenant mutinying against a general. The ISIS emir was calling his boss a has-been and a sell-out.
The al-Nusra–ISIS rupture led directly to yet another transformation in the ranks of regional, not to say global, jihadism. The majority of foreign fighters in al-Nusra’s ranks went over to ISIS, leaving the rump organization under al-Jolani heavily Syrian in constitution.
Inside Iraq, the dynamics and nature of ISIS changed as well. Al-Baghdadi had earnestly taken up the PR gambit inaugurated by al-Zarqawi, and then expanded by al-Masri and the first al-Baghdadi, and further Iraq-ized ISI, outfitting its upper echelons with former Saddamists. By incorporating al-Nusra’s lower and middle cadres, al-Baghdadi thus found himself once again commanding a more internationalized terror army, one that spanned the Levant and Mesopotamia. Thus, by renouncing al-Qaeda, al-Baghdadi actually returned ISIS to a version of its earliest incarnation in Iraq.
THE SCHOOLTEACHER OF RAQQA
Souad Nawfal remembered when the anti-Assad protests gained traction in Raqqa. It was March 15, 2012, shortly after the death of Ali Babinsky, the first resident of the eastern province of Syria to be killed by regime forces. He was seventeen years old. “We buried him and then when we had a funeral and protest on his behalf, they fired on us and killed sixteen of our people.”
She also remembered when she started protesting ISIS. “I started demonstrating because they took Father Paolo,” she said, referring to the Italian Jesuit priest who for decades ran a parish north of Damascus and supported the Syrian revolution from its inception. After joining protests in Raqqa in late July, he was kidnapped by ISIS and has not been heard from since. “Paolo was my guest,” Nawfal, a short, forty-year-old, hijab-wearing former schoolteacher told one of the authors during an interview in November 2013. “He used to come to break the fast at Ramadan in my house. He was coming to speak out against ISIS. He wanted to stop the killings and secrecy, all the stuff the regime does. He went in to speak to ISIS, but he never came out.”
Nawfal became a hero to Syrian moderate activists, as well as a minor Internet celebrity for a four-minute video she made in which she lambasted ISIS for their draconian rule and religious obscurantism. The video is titled The Woman in Pants in reference to her refusal to adhere to ISIS’s dress code for women. Nawfal said that she’s spent the last two months protesting the new ideologues of her province, whom she sees not only as tarnishing Islam, but also as the mirror image of the very totalitarians she and her fellow activists wanted to be rid of in the first place. “They treat people horribly. They’re exactly like Assad’s regime. They scare people into submission.”
Much like the Mukhabarat during the early days of the protest movement, ISIS has also banned civilians from taking photographs or making any recordings of provocative behavior in Raqqa. “ISIS would beat people in the street with leather. If anyone was going around taking ‘illegal’ pictures of this with a camera, they’d be taken into custody. In the month and a half I was protesting in front of the headquarters, no one would take my picture because they were scared.”
The jihadi movement has succeeded, Nawfal believes, by preying upon the poverty, illiteracy, and wartime exigencies of this province to curry favor with the population. An especially effective tactic has been the brainwashing of Raqqa’s children. “People that are poor and uneducated and not paying attention to what their kids are doing, their ten-year-olds will go out and then ISIS will promise the family food and money. They elevate these kids and call them ‘sheikhs’ and give them weapons and power, turn them into child soldiers. But these are ten-year-old boys who have never studied theology, and now they’re sheikhs! I am worried that this is really ruining the idea of what Muslims are and what Islam is.”
Nawfal became a daily fixture in front of ISIS’s local headquarters, where she was cursed at, spit on, manhandled, and even run over. “I was standing out in front of this place, and there was an ISIS man with a long white beard who wanted to park his car there. But it’s a huge area. He told me I had to move. I told him no. So he started swearing at me, berating me, but I still wouldn’t move. So he hit me with the car twice. It wasn’t that hard, but more for him to make a point.”
She continued, “Every day they’d point a Kalashnikov at my head and threaten to shoot me. I’d tell them, ‘Do it. If you kill me first, then the second bullet has to go to Bashar’s head.’ That’d irritate them.”
Where her chutzpah may discombobulate the takfiris, the fact that she’s both a small, middle-aged woman and more or less a solo act in defying them likely accounts for her survival and precarious freedom thus far. Nevertheless, she insists that she’s narrowly escaped ISIS’s distinct brand of social justice more than once, the last time after standing up for the rights of Raqqa’s Christian community.
In late September ISIS attacked and burned two churches in the province, removing their crosses from the spires and replacing them with their black flag of global jihad. On September 25 it did this to the Sayidat al-Bishara Catholic Church, after which around two dozen people turned up at the site to protest. “I told them, ‘What are you doing here? Go to the headquarters,’ ” Nawfal said. She led a march, and some of the protestors began following her, but by the time she reached the headquarters, she found that she was all by herself. Everyone had dropped out of the retinue out of fear. A day later, another church was stormed; Nawfal again went to demonstrate after she heard that people had been arrested. This time she carried a sign that read “Forgive me.” The message was intended for her family, because she was certain that that day she’d either be killed or abducted. “First they tried to scare me away. They let off a bomb near me. I was there for ten minutes, and a sixteen-year-old member of ISIS came to me and called me an infidel and turned to the other ISIS men and said, ‘Why are you letting her live?’ He was about to kill me, but apparently he got orders for no one to talk to me.
“Five minutes later, a car came with guns and weapons. Somebody jumped out and started grabbing at my arm, hitting me on the shoulder. Another person was spitting at me, swearing at me. I thought I was finished at this point. I started to call the Syrian people around me. I shouted, ‘Are you happy, Syrians? Look what they’re doing to me. Look at your women, how they’re getting raped, how they’re getting attacked, and you’re just sitting there, watching.’ ”
Nawfal said she’ll only go outside to protest so long as no one on the street recognizes her. The minute an ISIS militant sees her, she leaves. She doesn’t stay in one place anymore but moves from house to house, a fugitive in her own city. She doesn’t believe the current situation will change in the near future. “If people have fear, Raqqa will not have freedom from ISIS. As long as ISIS continues to use the tactics of the regime, it’s not going to become free.”
Nawfal has since fled to Turkey.
SYRIA’S SAHWA
There are thousands more like Nawfal who have resisted ISIS locally in Raqqa and elsewhere. Abu Jarir al-Shamali’s criticism of al-Qaeda’s Waziristan operation—that the entire territory was more in thrall to Pashtun tribes than to the mujahidin—was of a piece with ISIS’s obsession about sahwats, be they in Iraq or in Syria. Paradoxically, in trying to forestall an Awakening, it ended up precipitating one.
On July 11 2013, Kamal Hamami, a commander of the FSA’s Supreme Military Council, was shot dead by ISIS gunmen at a checkpoint in Latakia. Although tensions following that incident ran high—“We are going to wipe the floor with them,” one FSA commander told Reuters—the matter was swiftly hushed up, and Hamami’s murder was referred to a Sharia court for “investigation.” Similarly, when ISIS “accidentally” beheaded Mohammed Fares, a commander from Ahrar al-Sham, believing him to have been an Iraqi Shia militiaman (he allegedly muttered Shia mantras in his sleep), ISIS asked for “understanding and forgiveness” to preempt internecine war. Neither ISIS nor any mainstream or Islamist rebel group wanted to start a civil war within a civil war. And though many FSA rebels saw ISIS’s draconian rule as a long-term danger for Syria, they also understood that Sahwa-come-too-soon would only benefit one man: Bashar al-Assad, who would then either sit back and watch the opposition devour itself, if not contribute to this self-cannibalization by helping ISIS attack the FSA.
That said, ISIS seemed intent on provoking a backlash. It kidnapped revered opposition activists, it terrorized civilians under its sway, it established monopolistic checkpoints that functioned more like chokepoints for rival factions. And it attacked Syrian rebels. On August 1, 2013, for instance, ISIS sent a car bomb to the base of Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) in Raqqa, killing thirty. ISIS then expelled the brigade from the city.
In late December 2013, the city of Maarat al-Numan, in Syria’s Idlib province, staged a protest in favor of rebel unity against the al-Assad regime—and for the release of an FSA officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud, who had been kidnapped days earlier by ISIS at a checkpoint. Curiously enough, Saoud, a defector from the Syrian army, had been traveling with a retinue to the Taftanaz air base in Idlib in order to parlay with ISIS and negotiate the release of military equipment—including antiaircraft missiles—that the latter had stolen from Fursan al-Haqq, an FSA faction. Saoud also represented the Idlib Military Council—a regional assembly representing all the rebel groups in the province—which had publicly demanded that ISIS free all its kidnapped civilians and pursue any civil or criminal complaints it had with rebels in the relevant Sharia courts. Saoud’s own kidnapping, then, came in the midst of his trying to broker a compromise with ISIS. Maarat al-Numan’s rally on his behalf had the intended effect: within hours of the protest action, ISIS released Saoud, making him the first FSA officer to leave its custody alive.
Then, on December 29, ISIS raided several dissident news organizations in Kafranbel, a city in the northwestern Idlib province, which had somehow managed, through two years of regime bombardment and the proliferation of jihadism, to retain the democratic principles of the original Syrian uprising. Among the buildings targeted was the Kafranbel Media Center run by the forty-one-year-old Raed Fares, an artist whose pro-revolutionary posters and slogans—all written in colloquial English and very often wittily allusive to Western popular culture—had helped make an Arab revolution intelligible to non-Arab audiences the world over. In one celebrated poster, the famous “king of the world” scene from the movie Titanic is reproduced, with Vladimir Putin cast as Leonardo DiCaprio and Bashar al-Assad as Kate Winslet. Lately, Fares had taken to comparing ISIS’s depravity to the regime’s, making them twin enemies of the Syrian people.
Hours earlier, before the ISIS raid, Fares’s Media Center broadcast a radio program featuring Syrian women discussing their recent divorces. All too much for the takfiris, who abducted six of Fares’s employees (they were released two hours later) and stole or smashed the center’s computers and broadcasting equipment.
“The reason Kafranbel became important is because it’s been persistently and consistently supporting the revolution in all of its aspects—whether it’s the nonviolent revolution or the armed revolution or the humanitarian and civil society work,” Fares told us. “The regime, when we would say something in opposition to them, they’d shell us. ISIS, when we made a drawing against them—the first in June of this year—they wanted to attack us, so they came and raided the Media Center. At the end of the day, they’re both the same. They’re both tyrants.” (Not long after this interview, which took place as Fares was touring the United States, ISIS tried to assassinate him in Idlib. He was shot several times but recovered from his injuries.)
On New Year’s Day 2014, ISIS finally overplayed its hand in Syria, killing Hussein al-Suleiman, or Abu Rayyan, a respected physician and commander in Ahrar al-Sham. Like Saoud, Abu Rayyan was abducted while heading to a negotiation meeting with ISIS. Abu Rayyan was locked up for twenty days and horribly tortured before being shot. Images of his mutilated corpse were then circulated on social media, outraging even those Ahrar al-Sham supporters who had hitherto urged patience and reconciliation with ISIS. However, the brigade accused it of exceeding even the barbarity of the al-Assad’s Mukhabarat and warned that “if ISIS continues with its methodical avoiding of refraining from . . .resorting to an independent judicial body, and its stalling and ignoring in settling its injustices against others, the revolution and the jihad will head for the quagmire of internal fighting, in which the Syrian revolution will be the first loser.”
On January 2 ISIS hit another FSA location, this time in Atareb, Aleppo, driving even Islamist fighters into an alliance with the FSA. The Islamic Front, which not a month earlier had commandeered an FSA warehouse full of weapons and supplies in the Idlib village of Atmeh, declared solidarity with a fellow victim of jihadist fanatics. “We hereby address the Islamic State of the requirement to immediately withdraw from the city of al-Atareb,” the Islamic Front stated in a press release, “and to end the killing of the fighters based on false excuses and return all unfairly confiscated properties of weapons and bases to their rightful owners. They must also accept the rule of God by agreeing to the judgments of the independent religious courts to resolve the conflicts that arise between them and the other factions. We remind ISIS that those who originally liberated al-Atareb and the suburbs of Aleppo in general are those whom you are now fighting.”
By that point, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad Saoud had joined with a new rebel formation known as the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, which claimed to have aggregated as many as twenty separate factions belonging to the Idlib Military Council. This new mainstream front, Saoud told us, was founded with one purpose: “to fight [ISIS].”
The last group to join this budding Sahwa movement in northern Syria was the Army of the Mujahedeen, an alliance of eight rebel brigades, all based in Aleppo. “We, the Army of the Mujahedeen,” it declared, “pledge to defend ourselves and our honor, wealth, and lands, and to fight [ISIS], which has violated the rule of God, until it announces its dissolution.” The Army of the Mujahedeen gave ISIS a stark choice: either it could defect to the mainstream rebellion or it could surrender its arms and leave Syria.
What had begun as localized conflicts transformed into a massive armed campaign against ISIS led by the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, and the Army of the Mujahedeen, which swept ISIS from its territorial perches throughout much of northern Syria. This campaign coincided with an upsurge in popular anti-ISIS protests in Idlib and Aleppo, which ISIS tried to suppress by shooting the protestors.
As the FSA had feared, the al-Assad regime wasn’t about to stay neutral in the internecine fight and intervened objectively on the side of ISIS. As the ground fighting continued, the Syrian Air Force took to bombing areas from which ISIS had just been expelled, hitting either FSA or Islamic Front targets, when it wasn’t hitting civilians, and prompting further allegations among activists that ISIS was little more than a handmaid of the regime.
By January 4, following an FSA-issued 24-hour deadline for ISIS to surrender and abandon Syria, two hundred jihadists had been arrested. ISIS had executed civilians and rebels and resorted to car bombings and the shelling of rebel-held territories. In a desperate communiqué apparently suing for peace, ISIS issued three demands. All road blockades in cities and villages be lifted; no ISIS fighter be detained, insulted, or harmed; all ISIS detainees and foreign fighters from any other groups should be released immediately. If these demands were not met, then ISIS would issue a general order to withdraw from all the front-line positions against the regime—the clear implication being that it would return territory to al-Assad.
On January 5 the Islamic Front announced that it had been given no choice but to turn on its former ally; it had been “push[ed]” to battle, and while its charter was initially welcoming of foreign fighters offering assistance in the struggle against al-Assad, it would “not accept any group that claims to be a state.” Atareb was retaken by the rebels, and the black flag of ISIS replaced with the Free Syrian tricolor. An activist for the Shaam News Network in Raqqa claimed that rebels had “liberat[ed] more than 80% of the Idlib countryside and 65% of Aleppo and its countryside.” Another declared, “the presence of the State of Baghdadi is finished,” in what would prove to be too optimistic a prediction.
By the end of the first week of January, al-Nusra was leading the charge against ISIS in its regional headquarters in Raqqa city, joined by Ahrar al-Sham. Some fifty Syrian hostages held by ISIS were released from Raqqa’s answer to the DMV—which had been turned into a makeshift prison—as was one of many foreign journalists held captive by the group, the Turkish photographer Bunyamin Aygun, who’d been kidnapped the previous month. Two churches that had been burned or confiscated by ISIS were also “liberated” by al-Nusra, which declared its intent to restore them for Christian use.
A quaky truce brokered between ISIS, on the one hand, and al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, on the other, appeared to lower the temperature a bit in the Aleppo suburbs, as did ISIS’s withdrawal from strategic areas close to the Turkish border, including Atmeh and al-Dana.
Al-Jolani blamed ISIS for the week of fitna that shook northern Syria but urged the formation of independent legal councils for resolving disputes to accompany the cease-fire. He also said that “detainees will be exchanged between all parties . . .and roads will be opened for everyone.”
Throughout the course of Syria’s brief Sahwa—an Awakening that suddenly featured al-Qaeda’s official franchise on the side of the sahwats—ISIS had raised a defiant slogan: “baqiyya wa tatamaddad” (“remaining and expanding”), promising to defeat this popular turn against it and reach the Arabian Peninsula. ISIS further bombed Ahrar al-Sham’s base in Mayadeen, Deir Ezzor, near the Iraqi border, and its spokesman al-Adnani declared war on the rebels, threatening suicide attacks and car bombings against Syrians.
Amid the fitna, however, tensions and divisions within Islamist groups fighting ISIS began to appear. Abu Omar al-Shishani, then ISIS’s commander in Aleppo, signed a truce with Abu Khalid al-Suri, al-Zawahiri’s delegate in Syria, who was acting on behalf of Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra. For the moment, calm was restored between the jihadists.
THE AL-NUSRA–ISIS SPLIT
But the damage wrought on the al-Nusra–ISIS relationship was irreparable. On February 2, 2014, global al-Qaeda formally ended its association with ISIS, issuing a public statement: “ISIS is not a branch of the Qaidat al-Jihad [al-Qaida’s official name] group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and the group is not responsible for its actions.”
One of the jihadists who smuggled himself across the Iraqi-Syrian border with al-Jolani during Ramadan in 2011 was Abu Maria al-Qahtani. His real name is Maysara al-Juburi, and he’s active on Twitter as a leading exponent for the al-Nusra worldview, particularly its ongoing family feud with ISIS, from which al-Qahtani defected after having served as a top commander. “The rumor is that he used to be a traffic cop before he became al-Nusra’s military operative in Deir Ezzor,” Laith Alkhouri told us. “He accused ISIS of destroying jihad in Iraq and Syria; he called the members ‘deviants.’ ”
The lineaments of this divorce ran throughout the marriage. They were already discernible in that awkward first encounter between bin Laden and al-Zarqawi in Kandahar in 1999, and in AQI’s tempestuous eleven-year history. And though al-Nusra and ISIS have cooperated tactically since the split, allegedly even mulling some form of reconciliation in the face of coalition air strikes against both organizations in Syria, there is little chance that a broad rapprochement will occur. The latest issue of Dabiq makes plain that ISIS views al-Qaeda as a spent force in jihad, and itself as the inheritor of bin Laden’s legacy. The differences are too deep and many by now, according to Alkhouri. “ISIS takes the super-rightist ultra-conservative route. It is legitimate to kill even those who you cannot otherwise repel their aggression. Jolani is one of those guys. Baghdadi is even rumored to have vowed to kill him. ISIS apostatizes Muslims who didn’t know they committed some offense. So if you insulted the divine using a slang expression, they’ll behead you even if you didn’t know you insulted the divine.”
Another major discrepancy is the chicken-or-egg one about Islamic state-building. For ISIS, theocratic legitimacy follows the seizure and administration of terrain. First you “liberate” the people, then you found a government. For al-Qaeda, it’s the other way about: Sharia laws comes into practice before the holy war overthrows the taghut (tyrannical) regime.
ISIS further claims that al-Zarqawi had a five-phase process for establishing the caliphate, and that he had accomplished three of them by the time al-Baghdadi arrived on the scene: the immigration of foreign fighters to the land of jihad (hijrah), their enlistment in the ranks of a militancy (jama’ah), and their undermining of the idolators (pretty much everyone but the Zarqawists and their allies).
JIHADI RECRIMINATIONS
One of the more curious epiphenomena of this breakup is seeing Jolanist loyalists accuse Baghdadis of working for the other side. Many al-Nusra supporters have pointed to how the Syrian Air Force had largely refrained for the better part of a year (2013–2014) from bombing rather conspicuous ISIS installations in Raqqa. Al-Nusra has a point.
A recent study conducted by the Carter Center found that, prior to ISIS’s military advances across Syria and Iraq in July and August 2014, the regime had “largely abstained from engaging [ISIS] unless directly threatened. . . .Prior to this [ISIS] offensive, the Syrian government had directed over 90% of all air raids against opposition positions.”
By Damascus’s own admission, it spent the better part of 2013 and 2014 mostly leaving ISIS alone in order to focus its aerial campaign against FSA and other rebel groups—for the simple reason that letting black-clad terrorists run around a provincial capital, crucifying and beheading people, made for great propaganda. One adviser to the regime told the New York Times that ignoring ISIS targets helped with the “tarring [of] all insurgents” as extremists.
We have also seen how the regime chooses to deal with terrorism by infiltration. An early defector from ISIS told CNN’s Arwa Damon in February 2012 he witnessed would-be suicide bombers being told by their battlefield emirs that they were going off to attack regime installations. In reality, they were sent on suicide missions against other rebels. “There were a lot of regime locations we could have taken without sustaining losses of our fighters,” the defector Abu Ammara said, “and we would receive orders to retreat.”
Some of this may owe to ISIS’s financial dependence on selling Syria’s oil back to the regime. As a Western intelligence source told the Daily Telegraph in January 2014, just a month before al-Qaeda formally severed its ties with ISIS, “The regime is paying al-Nusra to protect oil and gas pipelines under al-Nusra’s control in the north and east of the country, and is also allowing the transport of oil to regime-held areas. We are also now starting to see evidence of oil and gas facilities under ISIS control.”
“Whatever Bashar al-Assad and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi may think of one another personally,” Frederic Hof, the former State Department adviser on Syria, wrote, “their top tactical priority in Syria is identical: destroy the Syrian nationalist opposition to the Assad regime.”
Alkhouri said that this charge of ISIS’s collusion or conspiracy with the regime is widespread in al-Qaeda circles. “Five or six weeks ago, I came across a document—the person who released it said it came from air force intelligence—which said that Syrian intelligence has about 250 informants in the ranks of ISIS. I was not shocked in the least. I like to do reverse-engineering. How can I prove this by eliminating the noise? This is what you see: for many months, ISIS was very much capable of attacking regime soldiers but chose not to, preferring instead to transfer literally hundreds of its fighters to other areas in Syria that had been liberated by the FSA, Nusra, and other Islamist brigades. Why is ISIS doing this? Nusra says it’s for the expansion of its power: ‘Let other fighters repel or expel the regime, we’ll move in and rule the land after all the heavy lifting is done.’”
On Twitter, a popular account known as Baghdadi Leaks has been dishing what it says is inside intelligence on ISIS—and about the backstory of its emir. No one knows who runs the account, but the likelihood is high that it’s either an al-Qaeda operative or affiliate or perhaps a defector from ISIS looking to embarrass his erstwhile confederates by airing their dirty laundry. The portrait made of al-Baghdadi on this account is that of a mid-level member of ISI from 2006 to 2010 who rose through the ranks after having used his house as a drop site for secret communications between fighters and their commanders. “His job was apparently that of a go-between,” said Alkhouri. “If this is true, then he was definitely privy to secret communications—dates of operations, claims of responsibilities, the top structure of ISI’s Shura Council, who was powerful and who was not. And that means he was also privy to how Syria’s military intelligence was running rat lines into Iraq. This is how Nusra wants to scandalize him. ‘Baghdadi called Zawahiri a quisling, an upholder of Sykes-Picot? Yeah, well, look who’s talking.’ ”