Category: Kuwait

Check out my new ‘Policy Watch’ for the Washington Institute: “The Islamic State’s External Operations Are More Than Just ISKP”

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

Since the beginning of the year, counterterrorism and law enforcement efforts have zeroed in on the Islamic State’s Khorasan “province” (ISKP). This is unsurprising given that governments have connected ISKP to recent large-scale attacks and plots in Iran, Turkey, Russia, and Europe. Yet other provinces in the IS global network have also been involved in external operations planning—albeit unsuccessfully until the July 15 mass shooting against Shia worshippers in Oman, the first jihadist attack in that country’s history. For this reason, it is more important than ever to understand that IS today has a multipronged strategy to target its enemies, and this strategy is coordinated via its General Directorate of Provinces—individual “provinces” do not have independent strategies.

In the first half of 2024, there have been eight IS external plots and attacks unrelated to ISKP and seventeen related to ISKP. Regarding the successful attacks in Iran, Turkey, and Russia, governments disclosed the ISKP connection, but IS itself did not claim any of them for ISKP. The Turkish incident was designated as a Turkey “province” attack. Of the plots not related to ISKP, three have been connected to the IS province in Iraq (two in Germany, one in Kuwait), two were connected to the Syria province (in Israel and France), and the others were connected to the Somalia and Pakistan provinces (in Sweden and India, respectively). Given the frequency of such plots since January, more can be expected by year’s end.

With the Oman attack, it is still too early to know how it unfolded or what planning was behind it. Most likely, however, it was connected to IS-Yemen. From 2017 to 2019, IS leaders in Iraq and Syria asked the Yemen province to plan attacks in Oman targeting the embassies of countries that participated in the global coalition fighting the organization in Iraq and Syria. Hopefully, the Omani government will be transparent in its investigation and enable a better understanding of the network behind the incident, with Washington providing any necessary assistance based on its strong signals intelligence capabilities. Either way, the foiled plots not related to ISKP can help shed light on the Islamic State’s global plans.

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New release from The Islamic State: "Will of the Soldier of the Caliphate Abū Sulaymān al-Mūwaḥid: Relief Upon the Rejectionist Temple in al-Kuwayt Area – Wilāyat Najd"

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

20140629-220411
The Islamic State — “Will of the Soldier of the Caliphate Abū Sulaymān al-Mūwaḥid: Relief Upon the Rejectionist Temple in al-Kuwayt Area – Wilāyat Najd”

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To inquire about a translation for this release for a fee email: [email protected]
 

Idhā’at al-Bayyān presents a new release from The Islamic State: "Adoption of the Martyrdom Operation in al-Ṣābrī Neighborhood in the Kuwait Area – Wilāyat Najd"

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

20140629-220411
The Islamic State — “Adoption of the Martyrdom Operation in al-Ṣābrī Neighborhood in the Kuwait Area – Wilāyat Najd”

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To inquire about a translation for this release for a fee email: [email protected]
 

GUEST POST: The Syria Twitter Financiers Post-Sanctions

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

NOTE: As with all guest posts, the opinions expressed below are those of the guest author and they do not necessarily represent the views of this blogs administrator and does not at all represent his employer at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Jihadology.net aims to not only provide primary sources for researchers and occasional analysis of them, but also to allow other young and upcoming students as well as established academics or policy wonks to contribute original analysis on issues related to jihadism. If you would like to contribute a piece, please email your idea/post to azelin [at] jihadology [dot] net.
Click here to see an archive of all guest posts.
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The Syria Twitter Financiers Post-Sanctions
By Asher Berman
Introduction
A new type of financier supporting Islamist armed groups emerged during the initial years of the Syrian conflict. These Gulf-based financiers openly advertised their activities on social media, using the medium to attract donations from across the Gulf. In some cases, they publicly documented their successive trips to Syria and meetings with prominent Islamist rebel leaders, which made them celebrities in the Islamist Twitter scene. One particularly prominent network of financiers was associated with the Umma Party, a Salafist opposition movement that was started in Kuwait in 2008 and spread to other Gulf countries during the Arab Spring. Other financiers worked independently or banded together to form joint fundraising campaigns.
The international community moved slowly to neutralize these financiers, but in August 2014, the US government sanctioned two of the most prominent individuals, Hajaj al-Ajmi and Shafi al-Ajmi of Kuwait.i The UN also sanctioned Hajaj and Shafi, and Kuwait, through which most of the money was being funneled, passed laws designed to end the use of Kuwait as a weigh station for money moving to terrorist groups abroad.ii,iii,iv The financiers, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, have greatly curtailed their activities since August 2014 and have seen their celebrity diminished. Those who are still active use social media to fundraise for humanitarian projects in Syria and are no longer publicly supporting armed groups. The one exception is ‘Abdullah al-Muheisini, who is unique in that he left the Gulf and lives inside Syria fulltime. Although the sanctions announced in August 2014 did not target all of the individuals publicly fundraising for Islamist armed groups in Syria, it did create a new environment in the Gulf in which these activities are no longer being tolerated and seem to have stopped. The one exception, al-Muheisini, lives in Syria and is therefore not subject to the same governmental pressures as Gulf-based financiers.
The Financiers:
Hajaj al-Ajmi: Hajaj al-Ajmi was a relative unknown prior to the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, but he skillfully used social media to attract attention by documenting his successive trips to Syria, and quickly became well known in the Middle East. After the US announced sanctions targeting Hajaj, Twitter shutdown his account. Hajaj quickly created a new account and a hashtag was circulate called “#Campaign_for_a_million_followers_for_Hajaj_al-Ajmi” which helped him regain roughly 100,000 followers of the nearly 500,000 that he had pre-sanctions.v Hajaj, still an active social media user, seems to feel that the sanctions are unfair, recently complaining on Twitter that members of the Kuwaiti parliament continue to support the al-Assad regime without consequence, while he was sanctioned and can no longer engage in normal business activities.vi Hajaj appears to be struggling to adapt to life under sanctions. He told an interviewer that he is trying to work in the perfume business but cannot get the government to register a car or business in his name.vii His contacts in Qatar reportedly invited him to work with them, for which Hajaj expressed his appreciation on Twitter, but regretfully declined the offer due to an ongoing travel ban.viii
Although Hajaj was sanctioned by the US and the UN, sanctions did not target the charity that he ran and utilized to fundraise for armed groups in Syria, al-Haiah al-Sh’abiyah l-D’am al-Thawrah al-Suriyah (The Popular Commission to Support the Syrian Revolution), nor his partner in running the charity, Umma Party member Irshid al-Harji. The charity remains operational under al-Hajri’s leadership, but has changed its name to al-Haiah Zakat al-Sh’abiyah (The Popular Charity Commission).ix,x Despite the name change, the charity is using the same logo, Twitter account, and directs donors to the same address in Kuwait’s Aqilah neighborhood as prior to August 2014.xi,xii The organization now focuses on distributing relief in Syria, and recently delivered supplies to Syrians in Idlib and Lattakia Provinces in cooperation with the Umma Party’s Istanbul office.xiii
Muhamed al-Mufrih: Muhamed al-Mufrih was a Saudi-Arabian financier and head of the Saudi branch of the Umma Party, which formed in 2011 at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Saudi authorities, who do not permit organized opposition movements, quickly arrested the Umma Party leadership, but al-Mufrih was able to flee the country, surfacing in Istanbul. During the Syrian revolution al-Mufrih appears to have played an important role in the constellation of Umma Party-associated financiers, accompanying Hajaj al-Ajmi on trips inside Syria and dedicating an Umma Brigade training camp in honor of a United Arab Emirates Umma Party leader who was killed while fighting with Ahrar al-Sham.xiv,xv
Al-Mufrih died in December 2014 following a sudden and mysterious illness. Hakim al-Matiri, founder of the Umma Party, characterized al-Mufrih’s death as an assassination-by-poisoning, which was understood as an accusation aimed at the Saudi Arabian government.xvi The possibility of al-Mufrih getting assassinated was on the minds of the Ummah party leadership prior to his death in December 2014 due to assaults targeting al-Mufrih that occurred earlier in 2014 in Istanbul. The Umma Party responded to the preceding assaults by publishing a public letter to Turkish officials in May 2014 calling on the Turkish state to protect al-Mufrih from assassination.xvii
Al-Matiri’s eulogy for al-Mufrih provided greater detail on al-Mufrih’s role in financing Islamist groups in Syria. Al-Matiri cited al-Mufrih’s early involvement in the Syrian revolution, praising him for working with Abu Abdul Aziz al-Qatari in 2011 to support Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist armed group that operates alongside al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusrah, while it was in its formative stages. Al-Qatari was a veteran of the Afghan Jihad in the 1980s and was known for being close with Jabhat al-Nusrah. He founded and led Jund al-Aqsa, a jihadist group based in Idlib Province, until he was captured and killed in 2014 by the Syrian Revolutionaries Front.

Minbar at-Tawḥīd wa-l-Jihād presents a new video message: “Series on the Biography of the Life of Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī #11: Return to Kuwait and Ṣaddām's Occupation of Kuwait"

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

NOTE: For the previous parts in this series see: #10, #9, #8, #7, #6, #5, #4, #3, #2, and #1.
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To inquire about a translation for these video messages for a fee email: [email protected]

Check out my new Foreign Policy piece co-authored with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross: "Uncharitable Organizations"

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin


In 1997, employees of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHIF), a Saudi-based charity, were mulling how best to strike a blow against the United States in East Africa. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, one employee indicated that the plan they hatched “would be a suicide bombing carried out by crashing a vehicle into the gate at the Embassy.” A wealthy foundation official from outside the region agreed to fund the operation.
The employees’ plans would go through several iterations, but AHIF would eventually play a role in the ultimate attack. In 1998, simultaneous explosions ripped through the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya — attacks eventually traced back to al Qaeda operatives. Prior to the bombings, a former director of AHIF’s Tanzanian branch made preparations for the advance party that planned the bombings, and the Comoros Islands branch of the charity was used, according to the Treasury Department, “as a staging area and exfiltration route for the perpetrators.” The ultimate result was deadly: 224 people killed and more than 4,000 wounded.
This was, of course, before the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent crackdown on wealthy Islamist charity organizations such as AHIF, which provided a large portion of the funding that made international terrorism possible. As a monograph produced for the 9/11 Commission noted, prior to 9/11, “al Qaeda was funded, to the tune of approximately $30 million per year, by diversions of money from Islamic charities and the use of well-placed financial facilitators who gathered money from both witting and unwitting donors.”
But despite all the efforts made to shut down such groups, Islamist-leaning international charities and other NGOs are now reemerging as sponsors of jihadi activity. In countries like Tunisia and Syria, they are providing the infusion of funds that have allowed extremist groups to undertake the hard work of providing food, social services, and medical care. Jihadists, meanwhile, have discovered that they can bolster their standing within local communities, thereby increasing support for their violent activities. And governments are struggling to keep up.
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Check out my new al-Wasat article: "The Call to Islam: Hitin Urdu Magazine Interviews al-Qa’ida’s Head of Da’wah Khalid bin ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Husaynan"

Posted on by Aaron Y. Zelin

Over the past year or two, with the death of many senior leaders as well as al-Qa’ida’s longing for religious legitimacy, Khalid bin ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Husaynan (Abū Zayd al-Kūwaytī) has risen in the ranks and has been described by Jarret Brachman as “Zawahiri’s in-house version of Awlaki” and by Christopher Anzalone as part of al-Qa’ida’s “missionary vanguard.” I would simply describe al-Husaynan as al-Qa’ida’s head of da’wah (the call to Islam/proselytization). Surprisingly, little has been written about al-Husaynan.

With the rise of Abu Yahya al-Libi from 2005-2008 many saw al-Libi as a potential Bin Ladin successor or at least al-Qa’ida’s main religious mouthpiece. Indeed, al-Libi has touched upon religious areas and performed al-Qa’ida’s khutabahs for ‘Id al-Fitr and ‘Id al-Adha, but al-Libi has also been a figure that discussed political issues just as much as religious ones. In contrast, al-Husaynan more or less has stuck to purely religious topics, not mixing his lectures with political overtones. This is important to note because many in the Muslim and non-Muslim world have questioned al-Qa’ida’s Islamic character (and not to mention the fact that 9 in 10 individuals al-Qa’ida has killed over the years have been Muslims) and bona fides. As such, one could argue that al-Husaynan is al-Qa’ida’s answer to its critics by showcasing a purely religious side of its media releases. In 2010, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, al-Husaynan released twenty-eight lessons related to religious life that one should ponder during Ramadan. Similarly, in April 2011, al-Husaynan began a series of “Da’wah Lectures” dealing with similar purely religious topics. For instance, the most recent was “Lecture 12: The Virtues of the Night Prayer.”

Besides his lectures though, not much is known about al-Husaynan’s background besides that he is from Kuwait and was a religious teacher employed by Kuwait’s Ministry of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs. As such, Issue #7 of Hitin’s Urdu Magazine (translated by Flashpoint Partners into English) that interviewed al-Husaynan sheds more light on his background, religious upbringing, reason for joining al-Qa’ida, and general worldview.

Click here to read the rest.