[Defense One] Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir died in a recent airstrike, but his ideas will shape Islamic State and al-Qaeda tactics for years to come.
Last year, the Islamic State released a training video, one of a multipart series shot in Iraq. With its scenes of foot drills, target practice, and karate chops, it would have been entirely unremarkable were it not for a short classroom scene, in which an instructor walks viewers through the ideological curriculum forced upon new recruits to the ISIS cause. As he’s shown reeling off a list of some key topics in jihadist jurisprudence, one can glimpse a thick volume resting atop each of the 20 or so schoolroom desks--a manuscript that, while few would recognize it outside of jihadist circles, is instrumental to ISIS as a theological playbook that is used to justify the group’s most abhorrent acts.
Recently, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the obscure author of this book, Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, had been killed in a corner of northeast Syria by an American strike. Notably, at the time of his death, he was not affiliated to ISIS but, rather, its chief ideological rival in Syria, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), a group whose orbit he entered into sometime in the last few years.
Mystery and intrigue shroud the life of Muhajir, a man who has a rich aural lineage (literally days’ worth of online recordings) but who only appeared on camera for the first time in June of this year. However, while there is a striking paucity of open-source information about him, the Egyptian national, a veteran of the Afghan jihad and long-time al-Qaeda associate, had a massive impact upon the development of jihadist thought in the last four decades. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate his importance in the context of modern Islamist terrorism--neither the Islamic State nor al-Qaeda would be where they are today without him. |