Islamic State Messaging Focuses on Africa, Highlights Eastern Syria, and Attacks Turkey
The Islamic State (IS) releases a newsletter every week, Al-Naba, which contains a mix of reports about its activities around the world in the various wilayats (provinces) and ideological content, showing both what (and where) the group is focused on and how they think about issues. Four issues of Al-Naba were released in August 2022 and below is a brief summary of the contents.
Operationally, IS has been reporting a significant amount of its insurgent-terrorist activities from Africa, and that trend continued in August: West Africa, centred on Nigeria, is the largest-scale component of this, but the Congo and Mozambique appear weekly, and Somalia makes an appearance. The insurgency at the Centre, in Iraq and Syria, reports multiple attacks each week, and IS expanded the campaign, begun last month, to put a spotlight on its apparently escalating actions in desert region of eastern Syria. By IS’s account, it continues to gain strength and reach in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Ideologically, IS focused mostly on its enemies: Muslims who oppose it, particularly nationalist and democratic Arabs, who are said to have deviated from the faith; Turkey came in for severe criticism along similar lines, for being a “secular” government that acts only in its interests, rather than in accordance with God’s law; and, as ever and most harshly, Shi’is. One issue of Al-Naba even reprinted an excerpt from a lecture series by IS’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which contains among his most ferocious anti-Shi’a sectarian propaganda. A more abstract piece of ideological messaging, albeit broadly in the same area, condemned Muslims who have a concept of state power that allows for man-made laws.
INSURGENT AND TERRORIST ACTIVITY
Al-Naba 350, published on 4 August, had Africa (Nigeria) on its front page, reporting a series of attacks by the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) against the army and its aligned militias that killed and wounded thirty people.
There were attacks in Iraq (Diyala and Kirkuk) and in Syria (Deir Ezzor), where, among the insurgent operations, was the kidnapping and beheading of a PKK official who had been involved in the final battle against the caliphate at Baghuz. Al-Naba says this marks an “escalation” of IS activity in Deir Ezzor.
Christians were attacked, some of them military men, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, around Beni, by the Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP), and in Mozambique attacks on Christians killed six people, beheading two of them, in Macomia in the Cabo Delgado area, and a commercial convoy was targeted.
Six Taliban jihadists were killed and six wounded in Afghanistan, in attacks in Kabul and Kunar, by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP).
And in Somalia, a policeman was killed and two wounded in an explosion in Mogadishu by the Islamic State in Somalia (ISS). Al-Naba also noted the release by ISS of an extended twenty-five-minute video (on 30 July) entitled, “On the Path of the Conquerors”, “inciting the Muslims of Abyssinia and Ethiopia to migrate (al-hijra) to Somalia to perform the duty of jihad against the infidels and apostates. This is a reiteration, and specification, of the call IS made in mid-June for foreign loyalists to make hijra to Africa.
Al-Naba 351, published on 11 August, had Afghanistan on its frontpage under the headline, “Despite the Taliban's Desperation to Protect Them, Dozens of Rafida Mushrikeen [Idolaters, Polytheists] Were Killed and Wounded in Bombings in the Capital City of Kabul”. “Rafida” is a derogatory term, literally meaning “rejectors”, to refer to Shi’is. ISKP revels in the three bombings against Shi’is, timed for Ashura and the subsequent observances of Muharram, claiming to kill around twenty people and wound well-over fifty, and, as the headline suggests, uses this to attack the Taliban’s jihadist legitimacy since the group allegedly tried to prevent these attacks. ISKP also says it assassinated one Taliban official in Kabul. IS used automatic weapons against a gathering of Christians in Balochistan, Pakistan; casualties said to be numerous but not specified.
Attacks in Deir Ezzor, in eastern Syria, are recorded as killing seven operatives of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), known in the West as “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF). Al-Naba says this is part of the “ongoing attacks” (hajamat mustamira) in Deir Ezzor, a continuation of the messaging from a week earlier and the week before, which spotlighted IS’s apparently increasing activity in eastern Syria. Elsewhere in Syria, the assassination of a member of the regime’s Air Force Intelligence is reported, notably in the south, in the town of Al-Musayfira in Deraa—advertised IS activities there are quite rare, though there has been another quite recently, in early July—and another anti-regime attack was reported in Raqqa, the blowing up of a patrol car near the Tabqa Airport.
Interestingly, only one attack from Iraq was reported in this edition, an attack on federal police in Kirkuk. The other reported attacks are in Africa: against soldiers in Nigeria; against Christian soldiers and civilian villages in the Congo and Mozambique; and by Wilayat Sinai in Egypt, killing two soldiers and two members of “the MOSSAD militia” (Sinai Tribes Union or STU).
Al-Naba 352, published on 18 August, had Africa (Congo) on its front page: the prison break on the night of 9 August in Butembo in the North Kivu region. IS is oddly unspecific about the number of people broken out of the Kakwanguru central prison in this latest episode of its “Breaking the Walls” campaign, simply saying the attack led to the “liberation of dozens of Muslims”. Independent reporting suggests more than 800 people were sprung. A video produced during the Kakwanguru attack is highlighted by Al-Naba: “One of the soldiers of the caliphate [in the video] affirmed that their jihad [in the Congo] is an extension (imtidad) of the Islamic State’s jihad across all the wilayats; that the war with the Christians is a religious war, not an ethnic or tribal one; and that they have only one of three options: convert to Islam, pay the jizya, or be killed.” (IS insists on this religious framing in all circumstances.) Al-Naba claims “a number of Christian prisoners” took them up on the first option, converting to Islam and insisting on joining IS. The Naba article goes on to claim ISCAP operations elsewhere in the Congo: burning Christian villages in Ituri and attacking a military barracks in Beni.
The recorded attacks in Iraq spanned Anbar, Diyala, and Kirkuk, where the home of a mukhtar (community leader) was blown up. In Syria, attacks in Raqqa included an assassination of a regime soldier and three IED attacks on patrol cars of the PKK, plus two anti-PKK attacks in Deir Ezzor.
There were attacks on the army and Christian civilians in Nigeria.
And on 11 August in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber, named as Khaled al-Logari, managed to bypass Taliban security measures to kill Rahimullah Haqqani, “one of the most prominent pretenders of the Taliban militia”, in his office. Rahimullah was an important pro-Taliban (and anti-ISKP) cleric: he had gained something of a reputation for supporting the right of women to education; he was not related to the so-called Haqqani Network.
Al-Naba 353, published on 25 August, once again had Africa (Nigeria) on its front page, celebrating six attacks that killed a Christian civilian, burned a church and several Christian homes, and struck three military checkpoints and an army barracks. Seven Christians were killed in the Congo, their property looted and villages put to the torch in the Beni area. A patrol of the STU was ambushed in Egypt, west of Rafah, killing one. In Iraq, policemen and a mukhtar were killed in Kirkuk; other attacks took place in Salahuddin, Diyala, and north of Baghdad. Anti-PKK attacks in Syria took place in Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, and Hasaka. And in Pakistan, a police station in Bajaur was bombed, killing one—a gruesome picture of him is presented—and wounding two. A lot of space is given in this edition of Al-Naba to three ideological essays.
IDEOLOGICAL MESSAGING
Editions of Al-Naba have a main editorial on page three, which gives a more in-depth outlay of the propaganda messaging IS wants to focus on that week.
Al-Naba 350’s editorial, entitled, “The Rafidi Conflict in Iraq”, focused on the chaos in Baghdad where Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers had, among other things, stormed the Green Zone on 30 July as part of Al-Sadr’s stand-off with other elements of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) network over who gets to be Iraqi Prime Minister following the October 2021 election.
Al-Naba 350 says that the Iraqi Shi’a parties usually suppress their differences to avoid giving space for IS or the Iraqi Kurdish parties to exploit, but the intra-Shi’a conflicts has now reached a “critical stage” where they cannot contain these long-standing tensions, even for the sake of their own interests and fears. IS says the conflict is marked by “never-ending contradictions”, beginning with the fact that “among the—at least—two main factions”, each accuses the other of being foreign agents: either loyal to the U.S./Gulf states, despite “America being the one who brought them all to power on the back of its tanks”, or to Iran, despite “both sides affirming their historical loyalty to the taghut [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, the founder of [the current government in] Iran and its Rafidi Revolution”. Likewise, each accuses the other of corruption, when the reality is staggering corruption among all of Iraq’s elite.
IS sees the American role as “tepid” (fatran), according to Al-Naba 350, while Iran has dispatched its senior leaders to Baghdad to “defuse the crisis” amid “growing talk of … a ‘civil war’ among the rafida, but it seems that Iran has so far failed in performing the mission previously done by the Americans!” Meanwhile, says Al-Naba, the “apostate” Sunni Arab parties that “participate in this miserable ‘political process’ are humiliated and weak”, waiting for the outcome so they can side with the winning faction. IS uses this to say there are no excuses left for the Sunnis not to unite around the jihadists’ banner. Whether under American or Iranian regency, Sunnis will never succeed in a Shi’a-led Iraq, since all the Shi’a parties are “hostile” to them, Al-Naba says: Sunnis are “left with nothing but crumbs dipped in the blood of their children, and [should] realise that there is no solution to their weakness except jihad”.
The main editorial in Al-Naba 351 is a tirade against Muslim opponents of IS, the “hypocrites” (munafiqun), who are so prominent on Arab “satellite channels and [in] magazines”, presenting themselves as “neutral” observers and “reformers”, while amplifying every rumour and “slander” against IS. In reality, says Al-Naba, such people are “al-mufsidun” (corrupters or seditionists). Their aim, by Al-Naba’s account, is to turn Muslims away from true Islam, but they “cannot change the reality” of the creed God laid down and the divine path IS is walking.
Al-Naba 351 contained another interesting ideological item, on page 11, an excerpt from “Hal Ataka Hadith al-Rafida” (Has the Word/Discourse/News of the Rejectors Reached You?), which is a series of four one-hour videos released by Zarqawi, published on 1 June 2006, six days before Zarqawi was killed. The videos were a ferocious anti-Shi’a polemic, and the clip presented in Al-Naba inter alia describes Shi’ism as being a “completely different” creed to Islam and Shi’is as working to “destroy Islam” by “spreading sedition” and doubt within the faith.
Al-Naba 352’s editorial is a condemnation of the use of human judgment—“whims and absurdities”—in realms were God has already laid out the answers. The focus is on Muslims contenting themselves with rulers, parliaments, and other consultative bodies governing them, with their “constantly changing” man-made laws, in spite of the fact God has already set out His “hikmah” (lit. “wisdom”) and clearly mandated submission to the eternal shari’a. As against this, says Al-Naba, entrusting legislating to error-prone and forgetful humans, who have debilitations like the need to sleep that do not afflict the Almighty, is clearly madness. The argument that God gave laws for applicable only in a certain time and place are “demonic falsehoods” (abateel al-shayteen) put about by democrats and polytheists/idolaters to justify their corrupt institutions, says Al-Naba. Ruling by God’s law ensures “honour in this world, the integrity of the deen (faith), and salvation in the hereafter, while the fate of rule by infidel laws is humiliation and corruption of the faith in this world, and halak (damnation) in the hereafter.” Naturally, IS concludes it is the only option for implementing this heavenly mandate.
Al-Naba 353’s editorial was an attack on Turkey’s policy in Syria. The article used the news hook of Ankara having recently “hinted at the possibility of ‘reconciliation’ with the apostate Nusayri regime”, i.e. Syria’s Bashar al-Asad. This refers to the controversial remarks of Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on 23 August, which came two weeks after Cavusoglu had publicly admitted to having met Asad’s foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, at the “Non-Aligned” Movement gathering in October 2021.
In Al-Naba’s perception, these actions of “the secular government of Turkey” are “one of the clearest” examples of the depravity that sets in when men are ruled by themselves and guided only by their “interests”, rather than by the shari’a. Turkey is accused of carrying out “the most heinous massacres against Muslims” when it fought IS in northern Syria and has “proven many times over the years” that no consideration comes above its state interests, according to Al-Naba, so it would be no surprise if the Turks “move from the role of ‘ally’ to the apostate [rebel] factions, to the role of ‘mediator’ [for them] with the Nusayri regime, and perhaps switching to the role its ‘ally’, despite having once called [Asad] a ‘terrorist’.”
Al-Naba 353 goes on:
Over the years of the Syrian war, the Turkish government has claimed that it supports the “rights of Syrians”, works to protect them and stand by them, and wished to receive them as “refugees” in its territory, even though the truth is it used them as a pressure card and for blackmail against the Crusader European countries if they opposed its policies! On the other side of the border, the Turkish government has diverted the battle from fighting the Nusayri regime to fighting the mujahideen by transforming the factions loyal to it into mercenaries fighting solely for the achievement of Turkish interests. Turkey fought the Islamic State using them years ago, and today it is fighting the Kurdish militias [PKK] with them. The intention is to create a “buffer zone”, which Turkey sees as a “protection” for—and perhaps an “expansion” of—its borders, and there is no way to establish this except by subjugating and exploiting the mercenaries, these humiliated slaves, as is happening today, where they have become mere pawns, moved by Turkey wherever and whenever it wants.
In sum, the Turkish government has used the “Syrian file” purely to achieve its political, national, and secular (almaniya) interests, sometimes with military force, and sometimes with “soft power”, by claiming to protect the “Syrians”, sheltering them, and distributing crumbs (fatat) to them.
The “mercenaries” referred to here are the so-called “Syrian National Army” (SNA), a militia conglomeration of Syrians—some former rebels and some recruited from the refugee camps after the rebellion was crushed at Aleppo in late 2016—that is indeed entirely controlled by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MiT) and used for Turkish national interests. The SNA has been banned by Turkey from confronting the Asad/Iran system, but the SNA is used to protect the Turkish border and in Turkey’s military operations—not just the anti-PKK operations within Syria, where the Syrian fighters have some conceivable interest, but as far afield as Libya and Azerbaijan.
Al-Naba 353 mocks the SNA for being powerless to affect Turkish policies over Syria, noting that the SNA was “neither informed nor consulted” before Cavusoglu’s statement, and this was true earlier when Turkey restored relations with Israel: “[T]hese unscrupulous followers [of Turkey]” justified this as merely an “economic” matter, but then “Turkey announced the ‘full return of diplomatic relations’ with the Jews, i.e. what is considered, according to their perverted terminology, ‘complete normalization’,” which IS considers “loyalty to the Jews”, and “the slaves’ opposition” to this did nothing to alter or even delay this course. Al-Naba asks rhetorically if the SNA will legitimise Erdogan throwing himself “into the arms of the Nusayris”, as they did with the Jews, “especially since we know that the tawaghit, ‘Bashar and Erdogan’, are affiliated with [Iran’s] ‘Axis of Resistance’!”
Whatever public protests the SNA make, says Al-Naba, “these apostate factions are not bound by any shari’a restrictions or regulations”, so they will go along with a Turkish reconciliation with Asad, should it happen, just as in the past they went along with whatever interests Saudi Arabia and Qatar dictated in order to retain their sponsorship. Because the rebels did not fight for the jihadist program to implement the shari’a and fight the mushrikeen, says Al-Naba, they lost sight of the fact that “God Almighty makes no distinction between the Syrian apostate and the Turkish apostate, nor between the Russian Crusader and the American Crusader”. By “deviating from the path of truth”, the SNA brought “humiliation” on itself, Al-Naba concludes, and the only thing the future promises is more concessions.
The editorial concludes with a quote from a speech by Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), the IS spokesman between 2011 and 2016, given at the end of July 2013. Falaha’s speech came shortly after IS admitted it was present in Syria, and began the feud with IS’s renegade branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, which eventually led to IS’s split with Al-Qaeda. The excerpt from Falaha’s speech described IS’s project, and the “projects” the jihadists confronted, making clear IS has no interest in popular consent or international acceptance: it intends to implement (IS’s interpretation of) Islamic rule because IS sees this as a cosmic duty, and to uproot all local democratic and nationalist projects, even those that (in IS’s view) disguise themselves as Islamist, as well as all influence connected to un-Islamic foreign governments (i.e., all of them). There would be, so far as IS could help it, no government established in Syria that made peace with Israel or received the recognition of the United Nations Security Council.
A JIHADIST PROFILE
Occasionally, Al-Naba features a biography of an individual jihadist—this is essentially a replacement of the “Distinguished Martyrs” series IS ran in the 2000s—and these fall into three broad categories. First, there are profiles of the organisation’s senior officials, sometimes from the very top, such as Abdurrahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari) and Wael al-Ta’i (Abu Muhammad al-Furqan), and sometimes from a level below, such as Abu Ayman al-Iraqi. Second, there are profiles of IS operatives, often foreign fighters, who became well-known. Notable examples here are: the British Mohammed Emwazi (Abu Muharib al-Muhajir), known from the tabloids as “Jihadi John”, and the Frenchman Fabien Clain (Abu Anas al-Firansi). Third, there are wholly unknown jihadists, such as Abu Umar al-Khlifawi, who led the last stand of IS’s caliphate in 2019; Abu Sulayman al-Libi, a Libyan killed in Syria; and Ahmad bin Sa’id al-Amudi (Abu Karam al-Hadrami), a Saudi killed in Yemen.
Al-Naba 352 (pp. 9-10) contained a biography from the third category, a man known—as is common in this category—only by his kunya, Abu al-Zubayr al-Askari, an Iraqi from Mosul. A summary of Abu al-Zubayr’s profile will be posted as a separate article tomorrow.