Check out my new ‘Policy Alert’ for the Washington Institute: "Al-Qaeda Disaffiliates with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham"

On the evening of February 2, al-Qaeda’s general command released a statement disavowing itself from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS): “ISIS is not a branch of the Qaidat al-Jihad [al-Qaeda’s official name] group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and the group is not responsible for its actions.” This is the first time in al-Qaeda’s history that the group has publicly disaffiliated itself with a group bearing its name — even though ISIS has not used the name “al-Qaeda” since 2006. While it remains too early to know its effect in the Syrian context, the statement is significant nonetheless — both historically and for what it means for the broader global jihadist movement.
Al-Qaeda’s repudiation of ISIS is highly reminiscent of the withdrawal of support by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abu Qatada al-Filistini, and Abu Musab al-Suri from the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in 1996 during the Algerian civil war. Usama bin Laden himself was highly skeptical of the GIA when it denied his request to set up training camps in Algeria, and he worried that the group had a troublesome ideology. Bin Laden even played a role in the creation of a less radical Algerian splinter entity known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in 1998, which changed its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2007.
Similar to the current situation in Syria, the GIA began confronting other Islamists instead of fighting the Algerian regime. Most notably, the GIA killed Muhammad Said and Abdelrazak Redjam, leaders of the branch of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) that merged with the GIA in 1994, as well as killing Libyan volunteers from the LIFG. Like the GIA, ISIS’s overuse of takfir (pronouncing a Muslim an infidel) and subsequent liquidation of enemies by any means has been a source of intense grievance from other Syrian rebel groups, as has ISIS’s unwillingness to submit to an independent sharia court and its belief that it is a sovereign state in liberated territory. Acting on this belief, ISIS has extrajudicially killed, imprisoned, and punished other rebels and civilians in northern Syria.
The lessons of Algeria played an important role when al-Qaeda first took umbrage at excesses by al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers (better known as AQI and one of ISIS’s earlier names) in Iraq during the last decade, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was still the leader. One of the letters al-Qaeda sent in 2005 to Zarqawi was from Atiyah Allah Abd al-Rahman al-Libi, one of the Libyans who went to Algeria and survived any onslaught from the GIA. The letter advised Zarqawi not to be so brutal and to focus the group’s efforts on the American forces. Libi’s lesson from the Algerian experience centered on the importance of not shedding innocent Sunni Muslim blood and the consequences it could create.
Since then, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan has implored its branches to refrain from attacking Sunni Muslim civilians and to focus rather on security and military personnel and their infrastructure. And on the whole, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda’s preferred branch in Syria) have stuck to this framework, even though there has been some collateral damage. ISIS has been the exception.
While al-Qaeda’s announcement officially ends an imperfect relationship that began in 2004, signs of a rift date back to May 2013. Following ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s April 2013 announcement of the extension of the Islamic state into Syria, Ayman al-Zawahiri tried and failed to nullify Baghdadi’s power play, calling for ISIS to stay in Iraq and allow Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) to be the preferred actor in Syria. In defiance, Baghdadi released an audio message stating ISIS would remain in Syria and would not adhere to a division based on the Sykes-Picot deal from World War I.
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