Sunday, June 14, 2015

How Isis crippled al-Qaida

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/how-isis-crippled-al-qaida

The inside story of the coup that has brought the world’s most feared terrorist network to the brink of collapse

Militant Islamist fighters in a military parade in Syria’s northern Raqqa province. — Militant Islamic State fighters in a military parade in Syria’s northern Raqqa province. Photograph: Reuters

Shiv Malik, Ali Younes, Spencer Ackerman and Mustafa Khalili

5,978

On 5 February, Jordanian officials confirmed that the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, had been released from prison. Though he is little known in the west, Maqdisi’s importance in the canon of radical Islamic thought is unrivalled by anyone alive. The 56-year-old Palestinian rose to prominence in the 1980s, when he became the first significant radical Islamic scholar to declare the Saudi royal family were apostates, and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. At the time, Maqdisi’s writings were so radical that even Osama bin Laden thought they were too extreme.
Today, Maqdisi counts the leader of al‑Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as a personal friend, and he is held in the highest esteem by the rest of al-Qaida’s regional heads, from North Africa to Yemen. His numerous books and pamphlets are required reading for Islamic militants around the world, who eagerly follow the latest proclamations on Maqdisi’s website, the Pulpit of Monotheism and Jihad.

But he may be best known for personally mentoring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded the organisation that would later become Isis, while the two men were jailed together on terrorism charges in Jordan in the mid-1990s. Zarqawi was released in 1999 and, after swearing allegiance to al-Qaida, went on to become one of the most notorious figures in postwar Iraq, unleashing a brutal campaign of sectarian terror, which led Maqdisi to publicly upbraid his most famous student in a series of devastating public critiques.

Now the man US terrorism analysts call “the most influential living jihadi theorist” has turned his ire toward Isis – and emerged, in the last year, as one of the group’s most powerful critics. Soon after the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of a caliphate last June, Maqdisi released a long tract castigating Isis as ignorant and misguided, accusing them of subverting the “Islamic project” that he has long nurtured.

Maqdisi’s war of words with Isis is emblematic of the new fratricidal split within violent Islamic radicalism – but it is also a sign that al-Qaida, once the world’s most feared terrorist network, knows it has been surpassed.

Isis has not simply eclipsed al-Qaida on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, and in the competition for funding and new recruits. According to a series of exclusive interviews with senior jihadi ideologues, Isis has successfully launched “a coup” against al-Qaida to destroy it from within. As a consequence, they now admit, al-Qaida – as an idea and an organisation – is now on the verge of collapse.

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On a sunny spring afternoon, three weeks after his release from prison, Maqdisi sat on a sofa at his friend Abu Qatada’s house, fuming about Isis: the group had lied to him and betrayed him, he said, and its members were not worthy of calling themselves mujahideen. “They are like a mafia group,” Abu Qatada added, while Maqdisi nodded his assent.

Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? - video explainer

Abu Qatada – who successive British home secretaries tried to deport to Jordan on terror-related charges – has joined Maqdisi as one of the most prominent radical clerics to publicly attack Isis, and his statements of condemnation have been even more scathing. Initially, their strategy seemed to be to bring Isis back under the authority of al-Qaida, using something like a good cop, bad cop approach: Maqdisi played the role of the disappointed father, admonishing and giving guidance in equal measure, while Abu Qatada has poured increasing amounts of scorn on them.

The list of Isis’s crimes that have offended Maqdisi and Abu Qatada is long. They include creating division within the wider jihadi movement, publicly snubbing Zawahiri and establishing a caliphate to which Isis demands every other jihadi swear fealty or face death. For more than a year both say they have worked behind the scenes, negotiating with Isis – including with Baghdadi himself – to bring the group back into the al-Qaida fold, to no avail. “Isis don’t respect anyone. They are ruining the wider jihadi movement and are against the whole ummah [Muslim nation],” Abu Qatada said.
Isis has been sufficiently worried by the increasingly vehement criticism from Maqdisi and Abu Qatada to embark on a social media campaign against them – said to have been sanctioned by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Isis’s chief propagandist. Isis social media accounts berate the two al-Qaida clerics as “stooges” of the west, part of a growing conspiracy against the caliphate. The sixth issue of Isis’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, featured a full-page picture of Maqdisi and Abu Qatada, labelled as “misleading scholars” who should be avoided more than the devil himself. “Qatada and I have been critical of them,” Maqdisi said. “They hate that.”

The two ideologues make an odd pair in the fight against Isis. Qatada is 6ft 3in tall, broad shouldered and lumbering, while Maqdisi is rake thin and full of hyperactive energy, bounding round the room and speaking at double speed; at serious moments, Maqdisi is given to making a sudden joke or bursting into giggles. Sometimes they will go for walks with each other in the Jordanian countryside. More often they travel long distances by road after being asked to attend funerals of fallen al-Qaida fighters.

Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida — Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida. Photograph: Mustafa Khalili

Maqdisi’s notoriety has ensured that he has spent most of the past two decades in and out of jail. (He claims to have been subject to torture – which is indeed widespread in Jordanian prisons; pulling the hairs out of a radical’s beard, he said, is one favoured method of inflicting pain.) It is widely believed that the Jordanians released him again this February because they realised, with Isis rampaging across the region, that his stature made him a valuable ally in the struggle against the militant group.

But Maqdisi and Qatada have looked on as Isis’s young radicals rampage from victory to victory – cursing, mocking and betraying the old guard as they go, while al-Qaida, largely guided by veterans of the Afghan era, has been brought to its knees in this jihadi civil war.

As Qatada poured tea into small glass tumblers, he began reeling off images to better communicate the depth of his loathing for Isis. He likes speaking in metaphors. The group, he said, was “like a bad smell” that has polluted the radical Islamic environment. No, they were better described as a “cancerous growth” within the jihadi movement – or, he continued, like the diseased branch of a fig tree that needs to be pruned before it kills the entire organism.

Qatada, who was once described by the British Special Immigration Appeals Commission as a “truly dangerous individual … at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al‑Qaida”, has a strained, high-pitched voice, like an alto version of Marlon Brando in The Godfather; he speaks slowly, pausing for effect. His broad frame easily filled one of the throne-like Louis-XIV-style armchairs that line his reception room. Comfortably ensconced, he turned to yet another metaphor to describe how Isis has recruited a generation of young Muslims who barely remember the 9/11 attacks. “You go to a restaurant and they present to you this beautiful meal. It looks so delicious and tempting. But then you go into the kitchen and you see the dirt and the filth and you’re disgusted.”

Both men are particularly appalled, they said, by the way Isis has used their scholarship to cloak its savagery in ideological legitimacy, to gain recruits and justify its battle with al-Qaida and its affiliates. “Isis took all our religious works,” Maqdisi said. “They took it from us – it’s all our writings, they are all our books, our thoughts.” Now, Abu Qatada said, “they don’t respect anyone”.

Such impudent behaviour, the two men agreed, would never have been accepted in the days when Bin Laden was alive. “No one used to speak against him,” Maqdisi lamented. “Bin Laden was a star. He had special charisma.” But despite their personal affection for his successor, Zawahiri – whom they call “Dr Ayman” – they both admit that he does not possess the authority and control to rebuff the threat from Isis. From the “very beginning” of his tenure, Zawahiri lacked “direct military or operational control,” Qatada said. “He has become accustomed to operating in this decentralised way – he is isolated.”

According to Maqdisi, al-Qaida’s organisational structure has “collapsed”. Zawahiri, Maqdisi said, “operates solely based on allegiance. There is no organisational structure. There is only communication channels, and loyalty.” And unfortunately for Zawahiri, Isis has done its utmost to ensure that loyalty is in short supply.

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