Islamic State Shifts its Focus to Afghanistan and China
Al-Naba, the newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), has published four editions so far in December 2022. IS uses the newsletter to report its operations around the world and to emphasise ideological themes. The operational content tends to come from three main areas—the Centre (Iraq and Syria), Africa, and Afghanistan-Pakistan—and Africa has generally dominated this year. There is a notable shift to the “Af-Pak” or “Khorasan” theatre in these last four issues, with attacks not only on the Taliban regime, but on foreign targets in Afghanistan, specifically the Taliban’s Pakistani master and China. There are no attacks reported in these issues from IS’s more inactive provinces like the Philippines, Yemen, and India. Ideologically, this month IS has tried to refute the questions about the demise of its “caliph”, to exploit the popular anger about the Chinese government’s genocidal conduct towards its Uyghur Muslim minority by presenting the attack in Afghanistan as “revenge” for all Muslims, and to capitalise on an opportunity to revive the memory of the Fallujah battles in Iraq in 2004 where IS first experimented with governing territory.
Al-Naba 367 (1 December) had on its front cover and in place of the main editorial the speech given by Abu Umar al-Muhajir, IS’s spokesman, the day before, announcing the demise of the “caliph”, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi.
The operations claimed in Al-Naba 367 from the Centre are two attacks in Iraq, on security forces in Kirkuk and Diyala, and one attack in Syria, an IED that killed two members of the SDF/PKK. The recorded attacks from Africa are: soldiers killed and Christians kidnapped in Nigeria; Congolese and Ugandan soldiers killed and wounded in an attack on a barracks in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an inghimasi attack on a military site outside Ismailia in Egypt; an attack around Cabo Delgado is northern Mozambique; and attacks in northern Mali by IS’s “Wilayat al-Sahel”. And from “Khorasan”, Al-Naba 367 claims three assassinations: a Taliban member and “two Pakistani government spies”.
The editorial in Al-Naba 368 (8 December) is an argument defending the legitimacy of IS’s claim that its leader is the caliph of the entire umma (Islamic community), despite the fact two have been killed this year (according to IS), and a refutation of the theories suggesting IS is being deceptive about what happened to Abu al-Hassan. IS argues that death has come for every human since Adam, and it does not claim that its caliph is not human. Likewise, other caliphs have been killed, either in battle or via assassination, and some of them after very short periods, citing as precedents very exalted figures like “the first caliph after the Messenger of God [i.e., the Prophet Muhammad]”, Abu Bakr or “Al-Siddiq” (The Truthful), who “lasted two years, and the fifth of the Rashidun (Rightly-Guided) caliphs, Hasan ibn Ali, … whose caliphate lasted only six months and [three] days”. IS says it has chosen its new caliph, Abu al-Husayn al-Husayni al-Qurayshi, according to processes and rules everyone knows, and allegiance has been pledged to him: “So the matter is over and done”. Al-Naba mocks the idea that people not committed to jihad or those loyal to impious regimes, such as Qatar’s and the United Arab Emirates’, have any credibility to choose a caliph, and lashes out at the “vulgar and absurd” theories about the demise of Abu al-Hassan being a ruse: IS says it always reports on the killing of its leadership figures as part of its “sincerity with its soldiers, supporters, subjects, and all Muslims”, and did so this time when no intelligence agency or international media outlet knew about it—they all “received the news exclusively from Al-Furqan Media Foundation”. IS “could have concealed the matter if it wished”, Al-Naba reiterates, but it announced it, just as it did with the death of the “previous speaker” (Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi), which is technically true, though IS continues to be extremely vague about this. IS concludes by essentially accusing Westerners of projection with these theories, because they live in tumultuous societies racked with power struggles, they assume that “mujahideen communities are like them”, whereas the record is clear that IS’s leaders only perish by detonating their own suicide belts or in airstrikes.
One attack that gets an important notice in Al-Naba 368 is the targeting Pakistani ambassador in Afghanistan on 2 December. IS says that “two mujahideen” targeted the ambassador and other Pakistani officials “in the courtyard of the Pakistani Embassy” using “medium weapons and snipers”, which “led to the injury of at least one guard”. Al-Naba declares it “noteworthy” that the attack occurred soon after Pakistan’s (female) Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Hina Rabbani Khar, had been in Kabul to meet the Taliban’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, to discuss cooperation “to secure the borders and counter terrorism”. The other reported actions from IS’s “Khorasan province” (ISKP) are the bombing of two shops in Jalalabad, one belonging to “idolatrous Sikhs” as part of “the war against the pagan sects”, and the other to assassinate a Taliban “spy”.
The front page of Al-Naba 368 is from Mozambique. Other operations recorded from Africa are an attack in Somalia, a relatively rare target, and attacks on troops in Nigeria. The attacks at the Centre include two against the PKK in Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, and three against Iraqi security forces and the Hashd al-Shabi militias, two in Salahuddin and one north of Baghdad.
Two pages at the end of Al-Naba 368 are devoted to the bay’a (oath of allegiance) campaign for the new caliph, Abu al-Husayn.
The front page of Al-Naba 369 concerns the attack on “the Communist Chinese and their apostate [Taliban] guards” at the Longan Hotel in Afghanistan on 12 December. Claiming to have received information from a “private source”, Al-Naba says thirty people were killed and wounded by two inghimasiyin, who targeted “a Chinese hotel in one of the most famous commercial districts in the capital” and “were able to burn parts of the hotel frequented by Chinese diplomats and businessmen”, causing “embarrassment to the Taliban militia, which is racing against time to try to weave together a network of [diplomatic] relations that will help it rule Afghanistan by anything but the shari’a, which it has abandoned”. Three talibs were supposedly killed and wounded. IS claims as “exclusive details” that its two ISKP attackers were able to check into the hotel using forged documents and smuggle in weapons and explosives in the days preceding the attack. The Taliban is ridiculed for “fail[ing] to protect the Communists and fail[ing] to conceal its failure”, using “crude” propaganda after the attack, “following the [example of the] apostate Arab governments”, of “denying any deaths” caused by IS and then claiming to have killed three attackers, “even though the attack was carried out by only two”. (The attack was also one day after China had asked for better security from the Taliban.) IS concludes by attacking “the Taliban militia” for seeking to “strengthen its alliance with Communist China”, despite Peking’s “open war against Muslims” (the genocidal repression of the Uyghurs). Al-Naba declares this typical, since the Taliban is trying to ingratiate itself with all of Afghanistan’s neighbours and all international bodies, no matter the shar’i considerations.
Al-Naba 369 (15 December) editorial is also focused on China. Al-Naba begins by condemning Muslim rulers who exploit genuine Muslim suffering for political and partisan causes, and condemning “Muslims and Islamists” who have made a lot of noise about “the issue of Uyghur Muslims” in the last few years, but never raised their protests above “hashtags”. Turkey’s ruler, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is singled out (without naming him) for exploiting this issue—and Palestine and Syria—while acting only for Turkish national interests, rather than on behalf of the umma. IS says it alone has bridged this gap between words and actions—which is warned of in the Qur’an—by translating its threats into action, taking “revenge” with the attack on the hotel in Kabul. IS finishes by claiming ‘credit’ for “avenging” Muslims on other fronts: blowing up Hindu and Sikh temples in Afghanistan in retaliation for India’s government officials insulting the Prophet Muhammad; striking at the Russians, also in Afghanistan (it is unspecified but Chechnya and Syria would be on the charge sheet against Moscow); and attacking the Iranian Shi’is in their own country.
Five operations at the Centre are recorded in Al-Naba 369, three of them in Syria—all against the PKK, one a targeted assassination in Hasaka—and two in Iraq, a bombing against security forces north of Baghdad and the kidnapping of a government “spy” near Rutba in Anbar province, who was “killed with pistol shots” after “interrogating him”. In Africa, IS claims to have killed and wounded “dozens” of Al-Qaeda jihadists in northern Mali; to have killed and wounded twelve Christian civilians and three soldiers in the Congo; and to have staged attacks in Nigeria and Mozambique.
The editorial in Al-Naba 370 (22 December) is a response to the United States Navy’s proposal to name a new warship the U.S.S. Fallujah. The Naba editorial quotes the press release saying, “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy” and, “The Battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in the minds of all Marines”. Al-Naba says this shows the Pentagon still has a “complex” about those two battles seventeen years ago, and while the U.S. might not have forgotten those episodes, they are trying to “distort” the reality “that that battle has not yet ended, and that it has spread today” far beyond Iraq, where “the descendants of [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi, [Abu Anas] al-Shami, [Abu Hamza] al-Muhajir, Abu al-Ghadiya, [Abu Muhammad] al-Adnani, and others … have preserved the legacy of Fallujah and its heroes well, building an Islamic caliphal state on its glory that forced Crusader America to mobilise the largest Crusader alliance in history to fight and eliminate it, though it failed at that and still fails, by the grace of God”.1 Al-Naba continues: “The lesson America learned from the first and second battles of Fallujah was to avoid, as far as possible, putting its soldiers on the ground in front of the mujahideen”, and instead to use “pawns” to avoid suffering the casualties itself, “and this is what we saw in the battles of Mosul, Al-Baghuz, and others”, where America made a “cowardly” decision to only engage using air power in support of proxies on the ground. “There is no doubt that the battle of Fallujah has become a nightmare that haunts [the Americans], and we promise them” worse, Al-Naba goes on, concluding that it is “the wisdom of God Almighty” that He keeps having America withdraw from Iraq and then “reluctantly” re-engage against IS, now in Syria, too. Fallujah, in Al-Naba’s reckoning, was a sign of things to come—an apparent victory for the Americans that redounded to IS’s benefit.
The front page of Al-Naba 370 claims a series of attacks in Syria against the Bashar al-Asad regime, reported by “a security source”. The attacks supposedly took place in the countryside of Aleppo, Raqqa, and the Badiya (the deserts of Deir Ezzor in the east). “About seventeen people” are reported to have been killed and numerous vehicles destroyed. The article concludes with a threatening message: the Asad/Iran system has apparently “begged” farmers and other locals to “be the eyes of the Nusayri army”, and the “source” encourages them to “desist and repent before the mujahideen gouge out their eyes”.
The other attacks at the Centre recorded in Al-Naba 370 include one more from Syria, an attack on the PKK in Raqqa, and four attacks on security forces in Iraq (Kirkuk, Diyala, Anbar, and Salahuddin). IS’s African operations—in Mali, Mozambique, and Nigeria—are notably claimed against Christians. There were no claimed operations in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
NOTES
Their real names are: Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Al-Zarqawi, Jordanian, founder of IS), Umar Yusef al-Juma (Abu Anas, Kuwaiti, deputy of the IS movement 2002-04), Abd al-Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza, Egyptian, Zarqawi’s immediate successor in 2006), Badran al-Mazidi (Abu Ghadiya, Syrian, border emir until 2008), and Taha Falaha (Al-Adnani, Syrian, spokesman 2011-16 and briefly deputy in 2016).