Zawahiri's Message

Submitted by Alex (United States), Sep 4, 2014 at 21:08

I am perplexed by the latest message from Ayman Alzawahiri that Dr. Pipes cites. I had been wondering what Zawahiri's response to the declaration of the Caliphate by IS and Abu Bakr Albaghdadi would be. Zawahiri's global jihad networks are probably infinitely more capable than those of IS, who have not trained their operatives in Iranian and Hezbollah camps or established cells and support networks in dozens of countries in and outside of the Islamic world.

By declaring the Caliphate, however, and enforcing the "Hudud" punishments for violations of Islamic law, Abu Bakr Albaghdadi has an advantage that obviates the professional competency of Zawahiri in carrying out terrorist attacks, in that the followers of a modern ideology--including in this case Zawahiri himself--must necessarily gravitate towards the more radical of two leaders once each has acted to demonstrate his loyalty to a shared cause.

The only reason I can imagine that Zawahiri focuses so much on South Asia in his new video is either that he is seeking to divide and share the global jihadist struggle between the Middle East on one hand and South Asia on the other, or that he is appealing to hadiths that IS and Hizb ut-Tahrir and Chechen jihadists often use stating that the final battle for Islamic conquest will come from Khorasan (the bay'ah to Abu a air Albaghdadi was called the "Khorasan Pledge").

Whatever the case, terrorist groups now have the added incentive of competition with each other to make life for the rest of us increasingly dangerous.

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