Islamic State Remembers A Martyr Who Defected From the Taliban
Islamic State Remembers A Martyr Who Defected From the Taliban
The Islamic State (IS) occasionally includes profiles of its operatives in its weekly newsletter, Al-Naba. In the 391st edition of Al-Naba, published on 18 May 2023, there was a profile of a veteran jihadist named Abu Mubashir, also it seems known as Haji Rabbani, who was part of IS’s Afghanistan-based unit, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). Abu Mubashir fought with the Mujahideen against the Soviets, then with the Taliban against the Mujahideen and the American-led Coalition, before defecting from and being killed by the Taliban.
The Naba 391 article, entitled, “Brother Abu Mubashir—May God Almighty Accept Him—Fought the Russians and the Americans and Was Killed in the Shade of the Caliphate”, begins with a mediation on the iniquities of the Jews, who refused to accept Islam despite being given the signs and condemned one of their admitted “best men”, Abdallah ibn Salam, a rabbi of the Banu Qaynuqa tribe in Medina, after he converted and died in the Prophet Muhammad’s cause.
The story of Ibn Salam’s conversion is not true, of course, even assuming he joined the Arab conquests of Byzantine Christian territory, for the simple reason that by the time of his death—given as being in the 660s AD in Islamic Tradition—there was no Islam in the form we understand it today for him to join; that was still 150 or so years away.
Al-Naba’s purpose in raising the story is to lambaste the Taliban for having an approach “like … the Jews”—one of IS’s most cutting insults—when they declare defectors to ISKP “evil”, despite having praised such people as “our best” only a short time before. “This is a story repeated at all times of conflict between truth and falsehood”, says Al-Naba, especially when a process is underway of true believers separating themselves from the “apostates” who falsely operate under the banner of Islam.
Al-Naba goes on:
Today we have the story of one of these heroic mujahideen, the brother “Abu Mubashir”, may God accept him. He was one of the first fighters [muqatileen] against the Russian and American invasions. He was a man of sound doctrine, who offered loyalty [al-wala] to the believers over all other loyalties, and fulfilled the [obligation of] disavowal [al-bara] of apostates even when it came to his closest relatives. He was a truth-seeker, so made monotheism [tawhid] his guide … When the Caliphate was declared, he was one of the first to pledge allegiance to it. He continued his path in its shade, fighting all the mushrikeen [idolaters, polytheists] as prescribed by the prophetic methodology until … [he was] killed at the hands of the nationalist militia [i.e., the Taliban].
Abu Mubashir is credited by Al-Naba as “one of the few men who joined the war early to confront the Russian invasion of Afghanistan” in 1979, and making “great sacrifices at that stage” in the war against the Soviets. “After the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, Abu Mubashir was not preoccupied with the looting and disputes that the warring factions [of Mujahideen] were consumed with. Rather, he went to Pakistan in search of shar’i knowledge” and enrolled in school where he “began receiving basic shari’a lessons, despite his age at the time”. The implication is young age, and this tallies with the details given later in the Naba article.
We deduce from Al-Naba that Abu Mubashir’s birth was in either the very late 1960s or in 1970. So, if Abu Mubashir really did join the anti-Soviet jihad “early”—in the period before Abdullah Azzam’s 1984 fatwa that drew in the bulk of the foreign fighters—it would mean he began his jihadist career as a child soldier for the Mujahideen, and was in his early 20s when the civil war among the Mujahideen began in 1992 and he departed to Pakistan. Al-Naba gives no indication which of the Mujahideen units Abu Mubashir joined and, indeed, is quite hazy about this whole period.
From the context given by Al-Naba, it appears that after Abu Mubashir was indoctrinated in the Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan, he returned to Afghanistan as part of the Taliban after 1994, waging an ultimately successful war to crush the Mujahideen and take over the country for the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda adjunct. One possible reason Al-Naba is so circumspect about this part of the timeline is that the jihadist network that includes the Taliban was—and is—an instrument of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, something IS knows full-well and has referred to in its propaganda: while this is an effective ideological attack on the Taliban’s jihadists credentials, devotion to an “apostate” spy service is an awkward fit in the biography of one of IS’s distinguished martyrs.
When “Crusader America” intruded into Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, Abu Mubashir is credited once again as being “one of the first” to begin waging war against them in his home province of Kunar, in the north-east along the Durand Line. By Al-Naba’s account, rumours were spreading at that time among locals, awed at the lone superpower coming into their midst, that if anyone tried to shoot at the Americans, “the barrel of the gun would be deflected” away from her soldiers. Abu Mubashir—“this young mujahid”—is said by Al-Naba to have accomplished “two things: he broke this image in the minds of the Muslims and actually began fighting against the American forces, and, secondly, he began calling and recruiting the youth [al-shabab] and supporters [al-munasireen] in every region [or area: mintiqa] and province” to wage holy war against Western troops. Al-Naba gives a remarkably specific verdict that “over time he was able to find supporters for jihad in fourteen regions of Kunar and the neighbouring Nuristan [province].”
By Al-Naba’s account, Abu Mubashir led numerous attacks on American bases in Afghanistan and “succeeded many times in dismembering them and tearing apart their remains, until they were forced to flee from some of these bases under the impact of [the jihadists’] successive strikes”. IS does love to revel in the gore and adds to this: “One of the most prominent of these attacks was the famous ambush where American soldiers fell from the top of mountains and ended up with their intestines spilling out of their bodies. This can be seen in old videos.” This is a reference to be battle between American Special Forces and the Taliban-Qaeda forces on Takur Ghar Mountain in the Paktia province in early March 2002.
Abu Mubashir was “seriously injured twice” fighting the Americans, according to Al-Naba, and “some of his wounds had not healed by the time of the [January 2015] declaration of [IS’s] Khorasan Province. Even these injuries did not prevent him continuing in the way of jihad.” Abu Mubashir decided to join ISKP early and “endured many obstacles and hardships” to find the ISKP wali (governor), Hafiz Saeed Khan, a Pakistani defector from the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), often misleadingly referred to as the “Pakistani Taliban”.
“Based on his previous experience and jihadist history, the emirs appointed him as an [ISKP] official in the Kunar province, and there he was active in calling for monotheism and inciting jihad in all the areas of Kunar”, which by Al-Naba’s account resulted in considerable success, bringing hundreds of Afghans into the ISKP fold, including some of its prominent future leaders, among them Zia ul-Haq (Abu Umar al-Khorasani), the overall wali of ISKP for six weeks beginning in April 2020. Abu Mubashir is said to have personally shaken the hand of Abu Umar to accept his bay’a (pledge of allegiance) to the Caliph.
Abu Mubashir “spent most of his life fighting infidels and apostates” and was “constantly preoccupied with military and leadership tasks”, Al-Naba says, but he nonetheless “loved to sit with the scholars who led the mujahideen … [T]hroughout the years he spent with the Arab mujahideen in the mountains of Khorasan, he was keen to seek knowledge whenever he could”.
One of the Arab jihadists Abu Mubashir got particularly close to was “the mujahid shaykh Abu Malik al-Tamimi”, whose real name is Anas al-Nashwan. Al-Nashwan was a Saudi, and since his kunya was sometimes given as “Abu Malik al-Tamimi al-Najdi”, it suggests he was from the Najd area in the centre of the Kingdom, the heartland of Wahhabism. Al-Nashwan was a prominent cleric in Al-Qaeda and an ideologically important defector to the Islamic State shortly after the caliphate declaration in June 2014. Al-Nashwan, most notorious for his appearance in the April 2015 video of IS in Libya beheading more than two-dozen Ethiopian and Eritrean Christians, was killed in May 2015 as IS took over Palmyra, the ancient heritage site in eastern Syria that the Zarqawists would occupy twice.
Abu Mubashir reportedly learned the Arabic language, the Hadith, and the shari’a from Al-Nashwan, before Al-Nashwan fled to the Tora Bora area of Nangahar province and then moved to join IS at the “centre” in Iraq and Syria in the second half of 2014.
The purpose of these biographies is to provide inspirational examples for IS’s foot-soldiers and potential recruits; their value to analysts as character studies in who is drawn to the Islamic State, and their assistance in resolving old mysteries, is, if not quite incidental (IS does have an eye on Western readers), distinctly secondary. This is spelled out in Abu Mubashir’s biography. Al-Naba praises him as embodying “many of the good qualities and good morals that a mujahid must possess and emulate”. The qualities the Naba biography lists are archetypal and designated in three broad categories.
First, a loyalty to all Muslims—by which Al-Naba means those who have accepted IS’s version of Islam—presented in a “populist” way of Abu Mubashir being “humble and merciful to common Muslims”. Abu Mubashir is said to have helped out any Muslim who asked for assistance, “especially during times of distress”, and to have “regularly” visited patients in hospitals, as well as maintaining his family relationships. Al-Naba claims this induced such love for Abu Mubashir in his home area of Kunar that “the people … would stand in the streets to welcome him when he arrived”.
Second, military proficiency. Al-Naba describes this as having three components: (1) Abu Mubashir’s alleged military skills: understanding operational security by, for example eschewing mobile telephones; always being prepared for emergencies, giving strict orders that men under his command were always to keep their weapons near them; and tactical competence in battle; (2) Abu Mubashir’s “good character”, a nod to his firm policing of corruption, financial and otherwise, within the ranks; and (3) Abu Mubashir’s strong obedience to the ISKP emirs.
Third, correct doctrinal commitments. In slight tension with the lauding of Abu Mubashir’s obedience to his superiors, he is also praised because his “pure” belief not only entailed harshness with unbelievers and apostates; it did not allow him to “flatter” those who claimed to be following monotheism. Abu Mubashir is described as “outspoken”, “courageous, and bold” in speaking the truth, as IS’s ideology has it, and fearing only God, rather than making allowances for friends or commanders who were in error.
After ISKP took captured territory in Nangahar, Al-Naba says Abu Mubashir was sent there, and took his family with him. Abu Mubashir is said to have led many of the battles, specifically Ghazwa Miftah al-Khayr, a November 2015 incursion memorialised by IS in a video release from its central media apparatus. Abu Mubashir collected many war spoils (ghanima) and recruits, says Al-Naba. The “members of the apostate Taliban” are said to have “feared him … and avoided attacking the territory he supervised”, though Abu Mubashir himself was not geographically confined, moving from front to front “tirelessly”. Al-Naba notes that
The end for Abu Mubashir came when ISKP’s territorial holdings in eastern Afghanistan were exposed to the “ordeal” of an American assault that “coincided with the apostates’ campaign against it”. This aspect of the war in Afghanistan was played down for obvious reasons, but it is true that the U.S. during the administration of President Donald Trump acted as the de facto Taliban air force in 2019-20 to dislodge the ISKP emirate around Nangarhar. “At the end of his life, [Abu Mubashir] was the commander of the Sa’id ibn Zayd Battalion in the Wazir Tanki area”, according to Al-Naba. The unit is named after a Companion (Sahaba) of the Prophet Muhammad, one of the earliest converts to Islam by the Tradition and a brother-in-law of the second Rashidun Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab.
Al-Naba says (obviously) that Abu Mubashir rushed to the frontlines to “confront the apostates’ attack” and was mortally wounded when his detachment of jihadists ambushed a group of talibs. Expiring an hour later, Abu Mubashir was aged 50, according to Al-Naba. While the date is unclear, if Abu Mubashir lived long enough to face down the combined U.S.-Taliban operation that liquidated IS’s caliphal pretensions in Nangarhar—declared completed by the then-Afghan government in November 2019—it suggests he probably died in 2019 or possibly as part of the mopping up in 2020 (thus, he would have been born in 1969 or 1970).
The final paragraph of the Naba article is a further ideological assault on the Taliban. After the Taliban-Qaeda takeover of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, says Al-Naba, they captured the Nangarhar area and these “thugs”, upon reaching “the grave of the venerable lion”, dug it up, “as usual”: “they did [this] with many other mujahideen … motivated by an intense hatred of the martyrs of the muwahideen [strict monotheists] who follow the aqeeda [creed] of the salaf [ancestors, predecessors, early Muslims] and disavow the deviant doctrines and methodologies” that anyone can now see the Taliban follow. “No wonder hyenas remain hyenas, and lions remain lions.”