Tag Archives: Syria

Lt. Kasasbeh’s Death Spurs Jordan On

The murder of Jordanian pilot 1st Lt. Moath Kasasbeh has galvanized the nation and its leadership. Jordan’s air force has launched dozens of bombing runs over Islamic State territory in the past two days in a campaign titled “Moath the Martyr.” Fighter jets carried out dozens of sorties, apparently destroying all targets while sustaining no losses, and returned to base after carrying out a fly-over of Lt. Kasasbeh’s home town. Jordan’s foreign minister Nasser Judeh stated that the airstrikes were just the beginning of their retaliation against the Islamic State, and they had yet to begin their war against the terrorist group in earnest: “We are upping the ante. We’re going after them wherever they are, with everything that we have. But it’s not the beginning, and it’s certainly not the end.”

Reports from the Iraqi media claim that the airstrikes killed around 55 Islamic State fighters, including a commander known as the “Prince of Nineveh.” With the execution of two jihadists, Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouly, by hanging after Kasasbeh’s death, Jordan is taking a hardline stance against the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Before Lt. Kasasbeh’s capture and death, many Jordanians had questioned their nation’s participation in the US-led coalition against Islamic State. Now, however, a rally in Amman in support of the airstrikes and condemning Islamic State’s execution of Lt. Kasasbeh drew thousands of people in support. Queen Rania joined marchers as they made their way through downtown Amman, bearing signs that claimed Lt. Kasasbeh as “The Martyr of Righteousness.”

However, Jordan also faces the threat of Islamic State militants possibly operating inside the Kingdom. An estimated 1500 Jordanians have left the country to fight for Islamic State. Demonstrations featuring the Islamic State flag were not uncommon particularly in the Salafist stronghold of Ma’an, Jordan, and Jordanian security has cracked down,on suspected Islamic State militants; around 200 arrests have been made in the last few months.

In the meantime, California Representative Duncan Hunter has revived a call to sell Predator reconnaissance drones to Jordan in order to help them fight Islamic State. The State Department had denied the deal last year, citing that Jordan was not a strong enough ally. The United States is already giving Jordan a billion dollars in economic and military aid this year, and has signed an agreement to give an additional $400 million in security aid a year until 2017.

With Jordan’s King Abdullah promising to fight ISIS until they run out of “fuel and bullets,” it’s certainly well within the U.S.’ interest to continue to keep Jordan armed and in the fight, although we shouldn’t underestimate the threat to stability posed by Jordan’s native supporters of jihad.

Kurds Take Kobani – What’s Next?

On January 26th, Kurdish resistance fighters ousted Islamic State fighters from the northern Syrian city of Kobani, a day after the Iraqi military retook Diyala province. However, Kurdish officials note that the city of Kobani is almost completely devastated. Immediately after their victory in Kobani, the Kurdish forces continued their offensive in order to capture surrounding villages held by Islamic State fighters. As of Tuesday Kurdish militia captured the villages of Qarah Hlanj and Helnjey, and have engaged Islamic State militants in the village of Shiran. Sources on Twitter state that fighting has resumed in villages surrounding Kobani as YPG troops engage Islamic State fighters. Islamic State sources have gone into full damage control on Twitter, claiming that Kobani was strategically unimportant, stating that Western airpower was the only factor in their defeat, or that the battle is still ongoing.

Though it is unlikely the loss of Kobani will seriously cripple the Islamic State, the losses of men and materiel during the battle will certainly hamper their operations. While the U.S. had originally been reluctant to attach significance to the town,  US and other allied airstrikes supporting the Kurdish fighters on the ground seems to have made the difference.

Hezbollah Retaliates against Israel for death of Jihad Mugniyeh

Israel’s military reports that two soldiers have been killed and another seven were wounded in a Hezbollah ambush on a military convoy near Mount Dov and Shebaa Farms Wednesday. Hezbollah fighters attacked the convoy with shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets. Additionally, Israeli army units stationed in Israeli communities were struck by artillery near Mount Hermon. These event comes in the wake of threats from Hezbollah and its Iranian patron, over retaliation for an Israeli airstrike last week which killed six Hezbollah members, and an Iranian IRGC general. Hezbollah has already claimed as much in an official statement, claiming the attack was launched by a group calling themselves “the heroic martyrs of Quneitra.” One of the anti-tank rounds fire, appears to have been labeled “Jihad Mugniyeh” after the Hezbollah leader killed in the attack. Mugniyeh was the son of the late terrorist mastermind Imad Mugniyeh, who was killed in Damascus by a car bomb in 2008, widely believed to have been conducted by Israeli Mossad.

Israeli forces responded to the Hezbollah attack by firing  on Hezbollah artillery installations in southern Lebanon. Both Hezbollah and Israel are reportedly reluctant to escalate the conflict further, with Israeli officials cautious about the attacks drawing Israel into the Syrian war, and Hezbollah officials telling a Kuwaiti paper that they did not intend to retaliate against Israel from within Lebanese territory. Since Hezbollah’s increased involvement within Syria, Hezbollah has been at pains to present itself as a throughly Lebanese rather than as merely an Iranian proxy in order to maintain its grip within Lebanon.

Why is ISIS Minting It’s Own Currency?

The media was fascinated this week by reports that the Islamic State (ISIS) is moving to produce its own currency, which is intended to be produced in gold, silver and copper denominations. Vox.com did an “explainer” on the subject, and CNN brought on former U.S. Treasury official Jimmy Gurelé to discuss the move. Gurelé noted:

“The difficulty, of course, with that kind of money is you can’t just put that money in shoe boxes and place it under your mattress. It has to enter into the financial system at some point in time. So I think the Treasury needs to be focusing on banks — banks in Qatar for example, and in Kuwait — that may be the recipients and handling money for ISIS.”

Which is true, if ISIS viewed itself as either a traditional terrorist organization looking to employ violence for political change, or if it was an insurgency attempting to establish a modern, western style nation-state. But they aren’t, and analyzing their behavior from these perspectives is ultimately a waste of time.

The primarily motivator for ISIS behavior is strict adherence to and imposition of shariah law, and in particular to the law as it was practiced by the Salaf Al-Salih, the original companions of the Mohammed. Given this, a reversion to a precious metal standard makes complete sense for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that many other shariah requirements involve payments which are calculated in traditional Caliphate coinage- the gold Dinar and the silver Dirham- or by the traditional measurement by weight-the daniq. These requirements include the imposition of Jizya (tribute) and kharaj (land) taxes upon non-believers, calculations for Zakat (annual tithe) etc.

For example, the medieval Shafi’ jurist Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Muhammad Ibn Habib al-Mawardi in his “The Ordinances of Government” one of the most respected works on the Caliphate and how it is to be organized notes that, “The tribute [Jizya] and the land tax [Kharaj] are two God-sanctioned payments that must be made to Muslims by the unbelievers,” although no one set amount is agreed upon by shariah jurists, either medieval or modern. Al-Mawardi writes:

Abu Hanifa (founder of the Hanafi School of jurisprudence) classifies those liable to it (the jizya) into three groups: the rich, who pay forty-eight dirhams; the average, who pay twenty-four dirhams; and the poor, who are charged twelve dirhams. In this way he sets an upper and lower limit to it, allowing no room for discretion by those in authority, while Malik (founder of the Maliki school) leaves the matter entirely up to them. Al-Shafi’i sets the minimum at one dinar, nothing less than which may be taken.

When ISIS took control of Raqqa, the group set about instituting the jizya in just such a manner as described by Al-Mawardi. According to the UK Telegraph:

Christians are obligated to pay Jizya tax on every adult male to the value of four golden dinars for the wealthy, half of that for middle-income citizens and half of that for the poor,” their decree said. “They must not hide their status, and can pay in two installments per year.” Four dinars would amount to just over half an ounce of gold, worth £435 at current prices.

And while it is tempting to view the Islamic State as engaged in some kind of brutal “renaissance faire”, playing at living life in the manner of medieval Muslims, they are certainly not alone in their desire to institute the jizya. For example, during the reign of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, prior to its overthrow, reports were made that Muslim Brotherhood members were extracting the Jizya in some areas. The Washington Times reported at the time:

According to Fr. Yunis Shawqi, who spoke yesterday to Dostor reporters in Dalga, all Copts in the village, “without exception,” are being forced to pay the tax. “[The] value of the tribute and method of payment differ from one place to another in the village, so that, some are being expected to pay 200 Egyptian pounds per day, others 500 Egyptian pounds per day,” Mr. Shawqi said, according to the translator. In some cases, families not able to pay have been attacked. As many as 40 Christian families have now fled Dalga, Mr. Ibrahim reported.

Hamas has also threatened to establish the Jizya if it should succeed in establishing a Palestinian state, and protection rackets demanding the jizya from Christians under threat of violence are well known throughout the Middle East.

In addition to the jizya, the desire to return to a traditional, shariah compliant, currency system based on gold and silver is also far more pervasive then one might otherwise assume.

For example, the former prime minister of Malaysia Dr Mahathir Mohamad has been a leading advocate for the Islamic world to return to the gold dinar and silver dirham system. In addition to Malaysia, Iran , and Indonesia have hinted at accepting a return to such a currency standard, and firms focused on providing gold dinars are in place in South Africa, The United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the United States. The dinar movement is only one aspect of a far wider effort to establish shariah compliant finance, a topic about which our sister blog Shariah Finance Watch, covers in far greater detail.

The point of drilling down on this relatively minor point regarding the Islamic State’s currency, is that ISIS behaves in matters both large and small in a manner widely understood to be consistent with shariah law, and efforts to establish the shariah take place both violently, as ISIS has done, as well as non-violently, while the end objective remains the same.

The Obama Administration’s Strategic Schizophrenia

Last week in the Wall Street Journal it was reported that the Obama administration sought an agreement on fighting ISIS with Iran:

The correspondence underscores that Mr. Obama views Iran as important—whether in a potentially constructive or negative role—to his emerging military and diplomatic campaign to push Islamic State from the territories it has gained over the past six months. Mr. Obama’s letter also sought to assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, according to another person briefed on the letter. It states that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.

It is now being reported that the same administration believes ISIS cannot be defeated without overthrowing Assad:

President Barack Obama has asked his national security team for another review of the U.S. policy toward Syria after realizing that ISIS may not be defeated without a political transition in Syria and the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, senior U.S. officials and diplomats tell CNN. The review is a tacit admission that the initial strategy of trying to confront ISIS first in Iraq and then take the group’s fighters on in Syria, without also focusing on the removal of al-Assad, was a miscalculation. In just the past week, the White House has convened four meetings of the President’s national security team, one of which was chaired by Obama and others that were attended by principals like the secretary of state. These meetings, in the words of one senior official, were “driven to a large degree how our Syria strategy fits into our ISIS strategy.”

The contradiction between these two policies should be obvious, as Iran has expended ample time, funds, and men (primarily through proxy forces like Hezbollah and other Shia militias) to keep Assad in power. In fact overthrowing Assad would by necessity require the targeting and destruction of some of the very same forces that the Obama administration envisioned fighting ISIS on our behalf in Iraq.

The administration’s utter strategic incoherence is founded on an unwillingness to comprehend what drives both the Iranian aims (through proxies in Iraq and Syria), as well as the forces arrayed against them.  As we have repeatedly pointed out here on the Free Fire blog (See here, here, and here), the Syrian opposition is dominated by Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-allied Islamist militias connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama Administration’s policy for Syria has involved alternatively partnering with these Islamists, while also bombing certain units of them during the course of the air campaign against ISIS. All sides in the current regional conflict are motivated by the same ideological agenda, establishing their hegemony in the region in order to extend (their particularly sectarian brand) of Islamic law, and to use future gains as a base for further jihad against their enemies, including principally the United States. Whether the U.S. attempts to partner with Iran against ISIS, or Al Qaeda against ISIS, or the Muslim Brotherhood against Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood against Iran, every permutation will result in the same eventual outcome. Victory for enemies of the United States.

The Obama administration has prided itself on it’s attention to “nuance”. In its dealings in the Middle East, it has repeatedly attempted to tease out differences and distinctions that are at best irrelevant, leading to the construction of a world view that is ultimately divorced from reality in any meaningful way. The result is that this Administration finds itself simultaneously on all sides, and still the wrong sides, of every strategic challenge.

 

Discussions of Broad ISIS- al-Qaeda Merger Overblown

Al- Qaida disavowed ISIS (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq or AQI) officially back in February 2014 after months of infighting due to ideological disagreements and a dwindling influence over ISIS leadership. Since the split between the organizations, the regional influence, recruitment, and military capabilities of ISIS have increased exponentially in a very small time frame. ISIS became a household name overnight and began to challenge al-Qaida’s long standing supremacy over the global jihadi movement, attracting a new and more radical youth generation to its ranks.

Sporadic clashes between ISIS and the Syrian al-Qaida group Jabhat al-Nusra have been occurring within Syria since the split but there’s some indication that this has changed. Recently, US intelligence and military officials have been closely monitoring the interactions between ISIS and al-Qaida groups within Syria and have noticed a change in posture. There is increasing concern that the formerly feuding groups are beginning to cooperate with one another as a result of the U.S. bombing campaign that began in September. For example, Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaida) fighters were just supported by ISIS militants in an effort that has effectively destroyed the U.S. backed SRF (Syrian Revolutionary Front).

So far the truces have been occurring sporadically in Syria and initiated only by local group leaders from both sides. The decreasing violence between ISIS and al-Qaida has been facilitated by calls to reconcile their differences and join forces to attack the West in response to the coalition airstrikes. Although this trend is concerning, there has been no indication that larger plans for any broad cooperation has been or is being discussed by the leadership of either organization.

The reluctance of ISIS and al-Qaida leadership to reconcile is important to note before jumping to any nightmare conclusions of the two groups merging back together. One of the reasons why an officially sanctioned merger between ISIS and al-Qaida is unlikely at this point is because the leaders of these organizations, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (ISIS) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (al-Qaida) remain completely at odds with one another.

These two leaders are unlikely to ever agree to a merger because they would not be able to share a leadership role. One group would have to be absorbed into another yet both ISIS and al-Qaida have established a recognizable brand name and would not be willing to give that up. The major reason why an official merger is unlikely is due to the fact that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has declared himself caliph, leader of the newly established Islamic Caliphate. In his mind and in the minds of his followers, this makes him the leader of all Muslims around the world and requires them to pledge their allegiance to him, including Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zawahiri nor other high-ranking al-Qaida leaders accept this declaration and would never subordinate themselves under Baghdadi who essentially used to be one of  Zawahiri’s employees. Zawahiri is a highly respected figure within global jihad and before the rise of ISIS and Baghdadi, he was the de facto leader of the movement. Approaching  Baghdadi for reconciliation would greatly damage his reputation and add to Baghdadi’s legitimacy. Baghdadi approaching Zawahiri for cooperation would make him seem weak and make his followers question his supremacy as the leader of the Muslim world.

Baghdadi also openly defied Zawahiri during the months of infighting that inevitably lead to ISIS being disavowed by al-Qaida. Baghdadi’s actions demonstrated tremendous disrespect to Zawahiri and al-Qaida leadership and will not likely be forgotten any time soon. The only circumstance in which it becomes possible for the two groups to join forces against the West would be if one of these leaders is killed. The death of Zawahiri anytime soon is a longshot since he is well hidden in the tribal regions of Pakistan. However, due to Baghdadi’s location and current popularity with the U.S. and coalition militaries, it is much more likely that he will be killed first.

The death of Baghdadi would give al-Qaida a chance reconcile and possibly re-establish control over ISIS as one of their regional players. Yet even in the event of Baghdadi’s death, it is still unlikely that the remaining ISIS leadership would agree to a merger. They have already established a brand name on their own and no longer need the al-Qaida stamp. ISIS already has its own established networks and funding, essentially limiting the benefits of re-joining al-Qaida.

No matter how the situation develops, I cannot see these groups sharing control in a merger. One group will have to be under the other and neither group would be willing to make that compromise. As long as Baghdadi still breathes, the cooperation between ISIS and al-Qaida will remain localized within certain areas of Syria only as a temporary agreement of convenience.

Obama’s Strategy on the Iraq/Syria Crisis Collapsing as Americans Go to the Polls

On September 10, 2014, President Obama announced his strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State and to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels to fight against the Assad regime. As Americans head to the polls today, this strategy is on the brink of collapse.

The Islamic State has continued to make gains on the ground and commit atrocities since the president announced his strategy. Over the weekend, the Islamic State executed 322 members of the pro-U.S. Albu Nimr Iraqi tribe in Anbar province, including dozens of women and children whose bodies were dumped in a well.   Pleas by the Sunni tribe for weapons to defend itself were ignored by the Bagdad government.

After enduring political isolation and persecution by the Maliki government, Iraq’s Sunnis are deeply distrustful of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Last weekend’s atrocity will make it more difficult for Iraqi officials and U.S. advisers to convince Iraqi Sunnis to support the government and fight against the Islamic State. New Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is struggling to bring Iraqi Sunnis back into the political process but has made little progress. Iraq’s Sunnis were further alienated by a recent report that Abadi intends to name an Iranian-backed Shiite militia leader as interior minister.

Obama policy on the crisis in Syria suffered a major setback yesterday when the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front routed moderate Syrian rebels armed and trained by the United States in the suburbs of the city of Idlib.   Al-Nusra fighters confiscated U.S.-provided weapons, reportedly including TOW missiles.

This development may confirm reports of a truce and possible collaboration between the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Previously, the al-Nusra Front had cooperated with moderate Syrian rebels to fight against the Assad regime and the Islamic State. Al-Nusra leaders reportedly entered into talks on collaborating with the Islamic State because it was incensed at U.S. airstrikes in northern Syria.

Further complicating this situation, the Islamic State made major gains on the ground in Syria this week by seizing two gas fields and pressing a major assault on an air force base close to the city of Homs.

Although the president’s Iraq/Syria strategy achieved some small successes, it has been widely criticized as far too timid and having no chance of “degrading and defeating” the Islamic State because it lacks a credible force on the ground.

The evidence is mounting that the president’s strategy is an utter failure and is undermining American credibility. It is crucial after the election that President Obama approve a much tougher approach to defeat the Islamic State, bring Iraqi Sunnis into the government, and prevent non-Islamist rebels in Syria from being wiped out. The urgent need for a better Iraq/Syria strategy is a compelling reason why Mr Obama must shake up his National Security Council staff after the election to bring in more competent advisors who will present him with insightful, hard-hitting policy options that are divorced from U.S. domestic politics.

The Key to Defeating ISIS: The Kurds

As the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate in the war against the Islamic State, one wonders how long our military can maintain its current air campaign, which has so far rendered ineffective in pushing back the jihadist’s advancements. It seems that the Obama administration is doing all it can to prolong and drag out the battle for Syria and Iraq. But this should not be the case.

When the Obama administration began looking for “moderate” Islamic rebels to back in the war, they overlooked a key, strong, pro-western ally in the region that could be a powerful ground force able of pushing back the ISIS blitzkrieg, the Kurds. The Kurds are the worlds largest ethnic group without a state to call their own, and reside in the large territory encompassing eastern and southern Turkey, northern Iraq and northeastern Syria.

The Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) military force, called the peshmerga, are well trained and brutal warriors. The Kurds do not consider themselves to be Arab, but a majority of the population is Islamic, with Christian and Yezidi minorities. Since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi Kurdistan has become increasingly autonomous allowing it to flourish economically, and be unaffected by the insurgency that plagues the rest of Iraq, with neighborhoods that resemble those in southern California.

The Kurds are pro-western, pro-democracy, moderate Islamic people who have the same security interests at heart as we do here in America. So why has Obama and his administration continued to ignore them, and opt for training and arming a flakey, mediocre at best Syrian rebel force? The administration to their credit has begun to give the Kurds some small arms and ammunition, but much more substantial support is needed if the Islamic State is to be defeated.

If Iraq and Syria continue to spiral further into civil war, the KGR may declare independence from Iraq, isolating themselves and shutting out the violence that surrounds them, leading to a chain reaction that will for certain tear the country apart. On the contrary, if the Kurds are fully supported by the U.S. and are able to destroy the Islamic State, bringing stability to the region, an independent Kurdistan would bring further stability to the region as well as a new Middle East ally to the United States.

So the question remains….what is President Obama waiting for? The Kurds are the key to defeating ISIS, and possibly finally having peace in the region.

The Clearing of the Pawns

It is now being reported that Al Qaeda’s Syrian group, the Al Nusra Front has accepted the surrender of the U.S.-Armed Harakat Hazm (HZM), and effectively neutralized the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF) by seizing it’s remaining bases. As the UK Telegraph notes:

For the last six months the Hazm movement, and the SRF through them, had been receiving heavy weapons from the US-led coalition, including GRAD rockets and TOW anti-tank missiles.
But on Saturday night Harakat Hazm surrendered military bases and weapons supplies to Jabhat al-Nusra, when the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria stormed villages they controlled in northern Idlib province.
The development came a day after Jabhat al-Nusra dealt a final blow to the SRF, storming and capturing Deir Sinbal, home town of the group’s leader Jamal Marouf. The attack caused the group, which had already lost its territory in Hama to al-Qaeda, to surrender.

According to reports, HZM surrendered its positions to Al Nusra and turned over its U.S.-provided arsenal without offering any resistance. Harakat Hazm has never been shy about fighting alongside Al Nusra, as one fighter proclaimed to the LA Times less than a month ago, “But Nusra doesn’t fight us, we actually fight alongside them. We like Nusra.” This coziness with al Qaeda is something that investigative reporter Patrick Poole has repeatedly noted, and raises the question of whether these surrogates upon which President Obama’s Syria and anti-ISIS strategy depends were ever really “our surrogates” to begin with? The, admittedly pro-Assad, Beirut paper Al-Akbar has claimed that HZM was explicitly created by the Muslim Brotherhood, and with the support of Turkey and Qatar, in order to serve as a recipient of U.S. aid.

Whether HZM was a Muslim Brotherhood front designed to fool the West from day one, or whether they simply lack the strength to continue resisting Al Nusra, the result is the same.  SRF and HZM  have now being cleared from the board, rendering painfully obvious what should have been clear some time ago. There is no force of “moderation” capable of ruling an intact Syria. U.S. airstrikes cannot defeat ISIS alone, and could not, even were they not hamstrung by a gun shy Administration that insists on controlling every aspect of the air war from the White House. Further escalation, through “boots on the ground” is, as reporter Michael Totten has noted,  a political non-starter, and for very good reason.  The idea that a force of Syrians can be extracted from Syria, tabula rasa, and then reinserted a few years later once they’ve been adequately armed and trained, as some have proposed, is a flight of fancy.  The future of Syria is likely to be decided between Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Assad regime, backed by Iran and Hezbollah.

Recognizing our lack of pieces to move should be the first step in crafting a new strategy, one which takes into account not just Syria, but the whole rapidly changing face of the region.

The “Khorasan Group”, New Name, Old Threat

Recent media coverage has been bombarded by revelations of a “new terror threat“, “more dangerous than ISIS”, the Khorasan Group.

Khorasan refers to the historical area under the Islamic Caliphate that corresponds to Iran/Afghanistan/Pakistan and the subcontinent, and the Khorasan Group, according to intelligence officials speaking to the media, consists of a relatively small (between fifty and a hundred) group of veteran Al Qaeda fighters from the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. These fighters are said to include a number of highly skilled bomb makers and other operatives, led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a native Kuwaiti, and long time Al Qaeda insider, who specializes in financing and facilitation. Jihadist social media is hinting that Al-Fadhli may have been killed in the first round of U.S. bombing.

Khorasan Group’s mission, supposedly, has been to find jihadists with western passports who have travelled to Syria, train them, and reinsert them into the West to conduct spectacular attacks of the kind that Al Qaeda is famous for.

Khorasan Group operates in and among Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and there’s been lively debate in the counterterrorism community over whether its really worthwhile distinguishing between Jabhat al-Nusra and Khorasan group at all. This is significant because Jabhat al-Nusra, despite being Al Qaeda, is deeply intertwined with the Syrian rebels at-large, and they are widely supported by these rebels, including those that the Obama strategy calls for arming and training to fight ISIS. For their part, Jabhat al Nusra hasn’t made the distinction, claiming they were the recipient of U.S. bombings.

It’s entirely plausible that intelligence suggested that this Khorasan group was preparing an imminent attack, and even if they weren’t, they are definitely enemies of America and a legitimate target.

But the extra hype about this specific group, and separating them out as somehow different or more threatening than Jabhat al Nusra, and Al Qaeda proper, has more to do with attempting to limit the negative reaction from rebels within Syria, and to distract Americans from the reality that in Syria there really are few good guys, with a possible exception of the Kurdish forces, who aren’t really receiving support. That strategy has already failed, with multiple Syrian rebel groups complaining about the strikes against Jabhat al Nusra, including one group expected to be the core of the force the U.S. intends to train to send against ISIS.

There has been an attempt to try to separate out elements of Al Qaeda, into Core, and affiliates, and in the case of the Khorasan group, small units within affiliates. Or for that matter to disassociate ISIS from Al Qaeda, as ISIS being “too brutal”, when the reality is that ISIS hasn’t engaged in any tactic that Al Qaeda didn’t institute first.

This is a misguided attempt to convince people that what we face is a series of minor groups, and that the enemy who attacked us on 9/11 is broken, and/or on the run. The reality is we face an overarching enemy, a Global Islamic Movement-which is how they identify themselves- operating in accordance with a knowable strategic doctrine that we are not addressing.

That doctrine is Shariah law. It is the same law that ISIS is instituting in its territory, and the same one that Jabhat al Nusra and several of the other Syrian groups would institute in Syria if they prove successful in defeating Assad.

Our enemy knows that you can not defeat an opponent you do not name. They do not say that their war is with the U.S. Army,  the 75th Ranger Regiment, or the 5th Special Forces Group. They say plainly and openly, that their war is with America, and the allies of America, and more importantly, that it is an ideological war, based on a conflict between belief systems which are irreconcilable.

Until we are prepared to discuss the conflict in ideological terms, we will forever be playing “whack-a-mole” with a never ending series of “new” threats.