Don't Panic E-Book

Gwynne Dyer

• Herausgeber: Periscope
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 239

Beschreibung

The entity known (in one of many variants) as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has come to feature regularly in the news, and in our imaginations. The dreadful, Grand Guignol spectacle of beheadings, abductions, cages, flames and triumphalist proclamations arouses powerful emotions: disgust, rage, hatred, grief, a yearning for vengeance - and the sense that something must be done. Yet, argues veteran political journalist Gwynne Dyer in this short, sharp, new book, the Western tendency is to overreact, time after time, to the threat posed by Islamist terrorists. ISIS is the most repellent of the bunch by far, yet the common perception that it is run by crazed madmen with no coherent strategy is sorely misleading. Even more difficult to accept is that the attacks they perpetrate actually have nothing to do with the West, and do not significantly increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Western countries, either; rather, they are designed to use Western overreaction as a stepping stone to seizing power in the states they are trying to overthrow. Intervening militarily will give ISIS precisely what it wants: a glue with which to bind its infernal project more tightly. In failing to recognise the ISIS phenomenon as a revolution calculated to court foreign intervention, the Western countries currently pondering the scale of their response risk playing into the hands of the extremists. 'The revolution will eat its children,' Dyer writes - but only if the West resists the natural urge to do something big, and allows ISIS to play itself out.

Leseprobe

Don’t Panic!

ISIS, Terror and the Making of the New Middle East

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Periscope

An imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited

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Copyright © Gwynne Dyer, 2016

The right of Gwynne Dyer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

ISBN 9781902932385

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book has been typeset using Periscope UK,

a font created specially for this imprint.

Typeset bySamantha Barden

Jacket design by James Nunn: www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press: [email protected]

INTRODUCTION

Far too much is written about terrorism. Even worse, most of it is sensationalist claptrap, which means there is a constant need to deflate the bubble of fabricated fear and restore some kind of perspective. Somebody has to do it, and maybe it is my turn again.

What makes me particularly reluctant to wade into the subject of terrorism again is that it means discussing a lot of foolish, fanatical or just plain evil people who are also Muslims. After a while you start to feel that no matter how many times you say that Islamist terrorists and those who support them are only a small minority of the world’s Muslims – certainly a smaller minority than the proportion of Irish Catholics who supported the IRA, or Sri Lankan Tamils who supported the Tamil Tigers – you still wind up sounding like you are saying that Muslims are the problem. On the other hand, three of the four terrorist incidents I was personally witness to (Bombay 1993, Moscow 2001, London 2007) did involve bombs set by Muslim terrorists. In the past decade and a half, the great majority of the terrorist attacks in the world were carried out by Muslims, so how can we not discuss it?

Al-Qaeda is out, and Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is in. The latter’s executions are more dramatic, and they make better videos: the one of the Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive in an iron cage was shot simultaneously from seven different camera angles. ISIS attracts more lost young men and women from the Muslim diaspora in the West than stuffy old al-Qaeda: there are practically line-ups at the Turkish–Syrian border. And now they even have their own “Islamic State”, with its own flag and a caliph and everything. Let’s have a book about that.

Well, okay, but I don’t want to scare people. They are far too frightened already, because the actual threat is very small unless you happen to live in one of the worst-affected countries of the Middle East. It is the media-fuelled fear gripping people in the West that empowers and indeed compels Western governments to do reckless things that actually serve the terrorists’ agenda. No surprise in that: these hair-trigger responses are precisely what today’s terrorism is designed to produce. That’s why I call this book DON’T PANIC! (with humble thanks to Douglas Adams).1

On the other hand, we have to take the terrorists seriously. That’s not to say that we must take them at their own valuation; they are considerably less important than they think they are. But ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and the rest are revolutionaries with a political programme, not just vicious idiots with guns. Their political programme, for those who do not share their own very particular religious convictions, starts at the implausible and ends up deep into the surreal, but all their actions, even the sickest and most cruel, are calculated to bring the day nearer when that programme will be fulfilled.

Many of the foot soldiers in any army haven’t the slightest idea what the strategy is, or any interest in learning about it. All that the men with the boxcutters on the hijacked flights of 9/11 needed to know was that they were going to be “martyred” and go straight to Paradise. They neither knew nor much cared what strategic benefits for the cause Osama bin Laden expected to gain from the massacre they were about to commit. But the people who make the plans and choose the targets are not only competent strategists; they are also good psychologists, for terrorism succeeds mainly through the perceptions it creates, not the actual damage it does. Being wicked does not make you stupid – more’s the pity.

So this book will have to do a number of things, if I get it right. First, it will explain why the Muslim world, and in particular the Arab world, has become the global capital of terrorism (the great majority of the victims being Muslims themselves, and in particular Arabs). Second, it will explain how terrorism works, by which I mean how it often (not always) brings those who employ its tactics closer to their expressed goals. Third, it will trace the evolution of terrorist strategies and terrorist organizations in the Arab world, for they have both mutated over time. Finally, it will offer some thoughts on what we ought to be doing about the “terrorist threat”.

I will be treating these four themes in parallel, or even all at once, because this is a story that has unfolded over more than thirty years and I would distort matters too greatly if I told it thematically rather than in sequence. Experts will spot places where I am eliding some of the finer detail of the story in the interest of concision, but I have tried not to leave out anything important.

The past dozen years, since the misbegotten US invasion of Iraq in 2003, have seen an almost continuous growth in the scale and reach of the Islamist revolutionary groups in the Arab world. In 2015, the Global Terrorism Index recorded 32,658 deaths – an 80 percent jump in just one year and a ninefold increase since 2000. Seventy-eight percent of those deaths occurred in only five countries – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria – and almost all the victims were Muslims. So were the groups that did most of the killing: ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the various franchises of al-Qaeda, and assorted Islamist groups in Pakistan. The Islamists are definitely on a roll now, and we shall probably see more seizures of territory in out-of-the-way parts of Arab countries and in Muslim-majority regions of adjacent African countries, followed in all likelihood by further pledges of allegiance to the “Islamic caliphate”, the seat of which is currently in Raqqa in eastern Syria.

But this rapid territorial expansion has been accompanied by a slide in the dominant Islamist ideology, away from the patient, pragmatic and flexible style of al-Qaeda towards the intoxicating “End Times” eschatology of ISIS. History as they see it now has a script, and the duty of those who serve Islamic State is to bring about the Apocalypse, all the way from the great battle at Dabiq (a town in northern Syria) that starts the sequence running down to the Last Battle at Jerusalem, where Isa – Jesus, to Christians – spears the anti-messiah Daijal, and then the world ends.

You would certainly not like to see such people in charge of a powerful modern state, but that is unlikely precisely because they are that kind of people. Bin Laden wanted to achieve such a state, spanning first the whole Arab world, then the entire Muslim world and ultimately the whole world, and he was prepared to take any path that opened up, for however long it took, to reach his goal. The ISIS lot just want to live out the apocalyptic script in the shorter term. This does help the situation a bit, because they cannot deviate from the script. We know where they want to go.

One last thing. The Muslim world, or at least its Middle Eastern heartland, now stands on the brink of a sectarian confrontation between Sunnis and Shi‘is that is potentially as big, as long and as violent as the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This looming threat is often portrayed, especially in the Western media, as an inevitable clash between two groups of fanatics, but it is nothing of the sort.

No reputable historian would explain Europe’s religious wars as merely a matter of rival religious doctrines. They were intensely political events, in which sectarian loyalties were ruthlessly manipulated in the service of domestic and foreign political goals. The same goes for the Middle East in the present day – and the right question to ask is: why now?

There’s an obvious explanation for why the Christian religious wars happened when they did: they were triggered by the second great schism in Christianity, which involved all of Western and Central Europe. It’s less obvious why Sunnis and Shi‘is should be at each others’ throats right now, given that the schism between the two main branches of Islam happened thirteen centuries ago. There were many bloody clashes between them at that time, but in most subsequent generations, in places where the population was mixed, ordinary Sunnis and Shi‘is lived in peace. In modern secular states such as pre-invasion Iraq, even intermarriages between the two communities were commonplace.

Moreover, nine out of ten Muslims are Sunni. You can imagine that this might lead to an occasional massacre of Shi‘is, but certainly not to a stand-up fight. However, in the Middle East the Sunni-Shi‘i ratio is much less lopsided. In the space between Egypt and Iran, Sunnis have a two-thirds overall majority, but the country-by-country ratios range from 85 percent Shi‘i in Iran to 90 percent Sunni in Egypt. And in the countries bordering on the Gulf – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf kingdoms and emirates – Shi‘is have an overall majority of at least a two-to-one, due mainly to the very big population of Iran. (This large body of water used to be known in English as the Persian Gulf, but that annoys Arabs so much that tactful people now say, simply, “The Gulf”.)

The trigger for the current Sunni-Shi‘i confrontation was the 1979 revolution in Iran, which became an “Islamic Republic” ruled to a large extent by Shi‘i clerics. The overthrow of the Shah and Iran’s successful defiance of the West made the Iranian Revolution very popular among Arabs, even Sunni Arabs, who were living under dictators and absolute monarchs who were, for the most part, in thrall to the West. The alarmed rulers of some Arab countries, especially those in the Arabian Peninsula, sought to counter this trend by emphasizing that Shi‘is are heretics deserving punishment (from a Sunni point of view), and in this enterprise they were greatly aided by the tens of billions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has spent in spreading its particular version of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the Arab world (and the broader Muslim world as well). Wahhabism has been virulently anti-Shi‘i ever since its emergence in northern Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century.

If we were talking about Christian sects, we would classify Wahhabism as fundamentalist. It is deeply conservative, even to the point of retaining traditional punishments such as beheading and stoning that had largely disappeared in other parts of the Muslim world. It is very concerned with ridding Islam of what it sees as later distortions of the original faith and getting back to the values that it believes were embodied by the first generations after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. This fundamentalism naturally intensifies the Wahhabis’ hostility towards the Shi‘is, whose split with the Sunnis dates from the first generation after the death of Muhammad in the seventh century.

Wahhabi leaders have been closely allied with the Saudi ruling house since 1744, and Saudi Arabia’s enormous wealth now gives their ideas great influence in Muslim communities everywhere, even among people who would not describe themselves as Wahhabis. A 2012 study by Pew Research, a nonpartisan “fact tank”, revealed that 40 percent of Sunni Palestinians, 50 percent of Sunni Moroccans and 53 percent of Sunni Egyptians now say that Shi‘is are not Muslims. No opinion polls were done on this topic fifty years ago, but a mass of circumstantial evidence indicates that as recently as the 1960s such extreme views were very rare among Sunnis.

Other varieties of Sunni believers that will crop up in this book are Salafis and takfiris. The Salafis share the basic Wahhabi conviction that it is necessary to get back to the early values of Islam, and are similarly puritanical and literalist in their approach to religion – indeed, some Wahhabis actually prefer to be called Salafis – but they do not have ties with the House of Saud. Some are militant and willing to use violence to further their cause; others work peacefully towards the same goals. Takfiris also espouse the basic Wahhabi beliefs, but are distinguished by their conviction that any Muslim who does not share them is an “apostate” whom it is lawful and even necessary to kill. They also believe quite strongly in the need to kill Shi‘is and expunge this great heresy from the planet. They are not exactly a sect, but it is they who populate the Sunni extremist movements now fighting to overthrow Shi‘i-dominated governments in Syria and Iraq.

On the Shi‘i side there are also various sects with different beliefs, though none as extreme as the Sunni takfiris. The Alawites, who dominate the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, are a divergent and secretive sect of Shi‘i Islam that incorporates elements of Christianity and other religions, and is seen even by some other Shi‘is as not really Muslim. Another group sometimes mistakenly seen as an even more divergent Shi‘i sect are the Druze, who also live mostly in Syria. However, their faith, while it is a monotheistic religion largely in the Abrahamic tradition, incorporates elements of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and even Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, and they do not see themselves as Muslims.

Sorry that took so long, but you really can’t tell the players without a programme.

1 To Understand All Is Not to Forgive All …

… But it does help to predict the terrorists’ actions and respond intelligently. Unfortunately, the West has been spectacularly bad at doing that.

We will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists.

US President Barack Obama on ISIS, 2014

This is about psychopathic terrorists who are trying to kill us. Like it or not they have already declared war on us.

[So bomb them in Iraq.]

UK Prime Minister David Cameron on bombing ISIS, London, 2014

We cannot stand on the sidelines while ISIL continues to promote terrorism in Canada as well as against our allies and partners, nor can we allow ISIL to have a safe haven in Syria.

[Bomb them in Syria too.]

Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ottawa, 2015

‘That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song,Bomb Iran… “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” anyway …’

US Senator John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign2

To be fair, Senator McCain has not actually advocated bombing Iran for the past few years. He has been too busy advocating bombing Syria. At first he only wanted to bomb the regime’s troops, but latterly he has urged the Obama administration to bombbothSyrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces and the new “Islamic State” founded by ISIS on Syrian and Iraqi territory. Why not? Two enemies for the price of one.

John McCain comes close to self-parody, but the distance between him and more “serious” Western leaders is not very great. Some of them (probably including Barack Obama) privately understand that bombing generally makes more new enemies for the West than it kills old ones, but domestic politics usually trumps foreign policy, and the domestic audience wants its leaders to “do something”. Bombing people in the Middle East is something Western governments can do without incurring significant casualties on their own side, so it is politically safe and answers the public demand for action. More often than not the action ends up being counterproductive in foreign policy terms, but that is a lesser consideration.

A more serious approach would begin by trying to understand the motives, goals and strategies of the disparate terrorist groups that allegedly threaten us. That is not easy, because their perspectives on history, their political values and their understanding of their religion are all quite unfamiliar to most people in the West. Indeed, parts of their belief system still seem pretty bizarre (if no longer unfamiliar) to a majority of mainstream Sunni Muslims as well. (Shi‘i Muslims, by and large, do not indulge in terrorist attacks on Western targets.) To make matters more complicated, the Islamist terrorist groups have differing theological views and different specific goals, although they all have a lot in common.

In order to get a sense of just how complex the situation is, consider the range of attacks and initiatives by Islamist fighters between 18 March and 3 April 2015. (I chose this period simply because that’s when I was writing this chapter.)

18 March:Two young Tunisians who had crossed the border into Libya for weapons training return home and attack cruise-ship tourists visiting the Bardo Museum in Tunis. Twenty-two people are killed, all but three of them foreign tourists, before the terrorists run out of bullets and are killed by Tunisian police. ISIS claims responsibility for the attack two days later, saying it was a “blessed invasion of one of the dens of infidels and vice in Muslim Tunisia”.

22 March:ISIS in Yemen sends four suicide bombers to attack two Shi‘i mosques in Sana’a, killing 137 people. Houthi (Shi‘i) rebels from the north, having already taken central Yemen, including the capital, push south to drive the incumbent government from its last stronghold, Aden. Fighters from AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) also approach Aden from the east, causing US Special Operations troops who controlled drone strikes in the region to blow up their heavy equipment at a nearby airbase and flee across the Red Sea to Djibouti. Now no American troops remain in Yemen.

25 March: Libya’s Tobruk-based government-in-exile announces an offensive to retake the city of Derna from ISIS and other militant groups. It presumably fails, as nothing further is heard about it.

26 March: Saudi Arabia, convinced that the Houthi rebels in Yemen are controlled by Shi‘i Iran, creates a coalition that includes most Sunni-ruled Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco) plus Pakistan, and begins bombing targets across the whole of Houthi-controlled Yemen. A ground invasion by Egyptian, Saudi and Pakistani ground troops will follow, the Saudis announce, if deemed necessary.

27 March:Syrian rebel forces dominated by the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front capture Idlib, only the second Syrian provincial capital to fall in almost four years of war.

28–29 March:Boko Haram gunmen kill at least forty-three voters during the Nigerian national elections. Earlier in the month, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, formally declared his organization’s allegiance to Islamic State, the ISIS-run “caliphate” in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

31 March:ISIS rebels gain control of much of the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, a southern suburb of Damascus. It is the first foothold of ISIS forces in the Syrian capital.

2 April:Al-Shabaab gunmen from Somalia launch a predawn attack on Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya (near the Somali border) and kill 148 people, the overwhelming majority of them students. The students are asked their religion and Christians are killed at once, while Muslims are spared. Kenyan authorities say the attack was organized by Mohamed Mohamud, a Somali-speaking Kenyan citizen who was a lecturer at the college.

2 April: Attacks on army checkpoints by Islamist militants of the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group in Egypt’s northern Sinai region kill ten soldiers and two civilians. In November 2014, the group had declared its allegiance to Islamic State: “In accordance with the teachings of the Prophet, we announce our allegiance to the Caliphate, and call on Muslims everywhere to do the same”.

2 April: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula forces seize the port city of Mukalla and the largest army base in eastern Yemen, effectively establishing AQAP control over the sparsely populated eastern half of the country.

3 April: The Iraqi government announces that it has recaptured the almost entirely Sunni city of Tikrit, the first significant loss of territory by ISIS since it overran western and northwestern Iraq in July 2014. But it takes Iraqi government forces almost a month to retake the city, and the fighting is done mostly by Shi‘i militias, not by the Iraqi regular army (which collapsed during the ISIS offensive in 2014 and still has only a few units that are fit for combat). The Shi‘i militias celebrate their victory by lynching not only captured ISIS fighters but also some of the few Sunni civilians who had stayed in their homes (on the grounds that they must have been ISIS supporters if they hadn’t fled). They also loot and burn hundreds of businesses and private homes. On 4 April Iraq finally pulls the militiamen out of the city, but the damage has been done: their behaviour will produce even more Sunni recruits for ISIS forces in the rest of the Iraqi territory controlled by Islamic State, and make its recapture even more difficult.

Confronted with all these complex alliances, bitter hatreds and inherited obsessions, and bewildered by all this churning violence, the average outsider is tempted to conclude they’re all crazy and just ignore the whole mess. That might be the best thing to do in some cases, but the problem is that at least some of the violence will affect the West no matter what it does or doesn’t do. So it’s worth trying to understand what’s actually going on and why.

Take the sixteen days of atrocities listed above, for example. At first glance it seems that almost half the victims enumerated were non-Muslims, but that is an optical illusion. We know the actual numbers of dead in the Tunisian and Kenyan attacks, but comparable killings in Syria, Iraq and Yemen were not enumerated, because innocent civilian dead are rarely counted accurately (or even at all) in that kind of fighting. Even excluding those who died in combat or were part of the “collateral damage”, and counting only those who were deliberately executed for being the wrong kind of Muslim, the Muslim death toll during that period would certainly be at least a low multiple of the non-Muslim victims of terrorism.

The slaughter at the Bardo Museum in Tunisia (in March) was intended to advance the cause of Islamist revolution in a Muslim country. The victims were foreign tourists, and Tunisia depends on tourism for about 10 percent of its Gross Domestic Product and for an even higher proportion of its jobs. The Bardo attack frightened many tourists away, and the subsequent slaughter of thirty-eight foreign tourists by a lone terrorist on Sousse beach on 26 June pretty well closed Tunisia’s tourism industry down. Most of those jobs will now vanish. This may destabilize the country, which is a high priority for Islamist revolutionaries. Tunisia is home to the sole surviving non-violent revolution of the Arab Spring, and the Islamists need to discredit and destroy the democratic reforms of that revolution.

The fighting in Yemen (22 March, 26 March and 2 April) began as just another of the tribal power struggles that litter Yemeni history. The Houthis, who have had great success in the current civil war, are Shi‘is (as are about two-fifths of the Yemeni population), but the war is not primarily about religion. At least as important is the fact that the Houthis are northerners in a country with a deep historical split between north and south. Moreover, they are allied with Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced to resign in 2012 under the terms of a “Gulf Initiative” that had strong Saudi Arabian support. The airstrikes and the threat of a land invasion by a Saudi-led, pan-Arab alliance of Sunni countries are intended to stop the Houthis from taking control of Yemen because the Saudis, who see an Iranian plotter behind every bush, have convinced themselves that the Houthis are actually just a tool in an Iranian power play to establish a Shi‘i base on Saudi Arabia’s southern border. But in amongst all this paranoia and folly, two Islamist groups, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS, have set themselves up in the less populated south and east of the country with the intention of creating bases of their own. Indeed, they are doubtless hoping at this point that if the Saudi-led coalition breaks the Houthi hold on Yemen but does not get its own troops on the ground fast enough and in sufficient numbers, the Islamists will be able to sweep the board with their own fighters and create another branch of “Islamic State” like the existing one in Syria and Iraq. AQAP and ISIS would probably end up fighting each other for control of that state, but they may be capable of cooperating long enough to set it up, if they get the chance.

The Syrian civil war (27 March and 31 March) stumbles on, with advances by Islamist anti-regime forces both in the north and in the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. The point to note here is that all the non-Islamist forces have been either driven out of business or absorbed by the Islamists in the course of four years of fighting. The US government, which still wants to believe it can avoid supporting either the Islamists or Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked dictatorship, continues to insist that it can build some “third force” of rebels who will defeat both the regime and the Islamists, but that is sheer fantasy. Sooner or later, Washington will have to choose.

Boko Haram (28–29 March) has had things all its own way for the past three years, mainly because the Nigerian army could not or would not fight, but the government was finally forced to focus on the insurgency in the northeast because of the upcoming general election (which had to be postponed), and the death toll during the voting was much lower than had been feared. The decision of Abubakar Shekau to affiliate his organization with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State is largely symbolic at this point, as little or no direct contact is possible between the two, but it does show the power of the idea: the territories controlled by the two men are 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometres) apart.

The massacre of Christians in northeastern Kenya (2 April), one of a number of massacres carried out by the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab in the past three years, is “retaliation” for the dispatch of Kenyan troops to Somalia as part of an African Union force. The force has the task of restoring peace in the country after a quarter-century of anarchy and civil war, but in practice its main enemy has been al-Shabaab, which has been part of the al-Qaeda network for more than three years. (It had been asking to join since 2009, but Osama bin Laden rejected its application, urging it to review its operations “in order to minimize its toll to Muslims”. This is probably why it now kills mainly Christians in its attacks in Kenya, but in Somalia itself the great majority of its victims are, of course, Muslims.)

The Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group in Egypt (2 April) has not yet extended its operations to Cairo, where other Islamist terrorist groups have been active since the military overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohamed Morsi in 2013. However, it does enjoy a fair degree of control over the northern Sinai coastal region, particularly in the area close to the Israeli frontier. In the ongoing competition between al-Qaeda and Islamic State franchises, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis has opted for the latter.