By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 December 2018
An Islamic State poster near al-Sukhna in the eastern Homs desert, Syria, August 2017 (source)
Over the past week, two members of the Islamic State (IS) have been arrested—a rarity in itself during the Coalition campaign against the group—and both in different ways give a glimpse of archetypes that have made up the organisation, from its inception to its expansion into Syria. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 November 2017
Muhammad Shakar had, according to his martyr biography, “become influenced by Salafism in 1997-98 while serving as a part of [Saddam] Hussein’s Special Republican Guard”.[1] Quitting the military and returning to his home in Mosul, Shakar was harassed by the regime until he went to join Ansar al-Islam in the mountains of Kurdistan.[2]
Shakar, known as Abu Talha al-Ansari or Abu Talha al-Mawsuli, joined the predecessor to Islamic State either just before or just after Saddam fell, and he was arrested in Mosul on 14 June 2005. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 September 2017
The most recent issue of Perspectives on Terrorism had a paper by Ronen Zeidel entitled, ‘The Dawa’ish: A Collective Profile of IS Commanders’, which was “the first attempt to provide a comprehensive collective profile of commanders and leaders of the Islamic State (IS)”. Based on “an inventory of over 600 names”, the paper assessed the nationality, ethnicity, and tribal origins not just of the very senior IS commanders, but those lower down, a novel and much-needed line of investigation. Zeidel found that these commanders of the IS movement are or were overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni Arab, with an important Turkoman contingent.
Zeidel’s findings are important for drawing attention again to the local-revolutionary character of an organisation that gets a great deal of attention for its foreign fighters and external attacks, especially in the West, but which only a recently acquired global reach—and, indeed, only recently needed to: until 2011, the West was easily reachable since it had troops on the ground in Iraq, so the incentive to invest resources in creating a foreign terrorist apparatus was minimal.
One small part of Zeidel’s work has created something of a storm, however. Zeidel gives the occupation held by these commanders and, for those where this was known, 72% of them were former regime elements (FREs) from the dictatorship of Saddam Husayn. This reignited the argument over how important the FREs have been to IS. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 31, 2017
Adnan al-Suwaydawi (source)
A video from the Islamic State yesterday listed a series of prominent past leaders of the organization. One was Adnan al-Suwaydawi,[1] whose full name is Adnan Latif Hamid al-Suwaydawi al-Dulaymi, and who is known most commonly either as Abu Muhannad al-Suwaydawi or Haji Dawud. For a long time, al-Suwaydawi was also mistakenly assigned the kunya “Abu Ayman al-Iraqi”, who was in fact a different IS commander. Al-Suwaydawi was killed on 15 May 2015 by a Coalition airstrike in Anbar Province, western Iraq, but he is credited by the Islamic State with their overrunning Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, the next day. A biography of al-Suwaydawi was circulated by IS supporters on or around 21 May 2015; it is reproduced below.
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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 31, 2017
Adnan al-Bilawi
Adnan Ismail Najem al-Bilawi al-Dulaymi (Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi), the leader of the Islamic State’s Military Council when he was killed on the eve of the Mosul offensive that he had planned in June 2014, was eulogized by IS’s official spokesman, Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), explaining his importance to the organization. Below is a profile of al-Bilawi and the section of Falaha’s speech dedicated to al-Bilawi. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 30, 2017
![Umar Hadid [right] (source)](http://web.archive.org./web/20210302140154im_/https://i1.wp.com/kyleorton.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/umar-hadid-1-right.jpg?resize=286%2C194&ssl=1)
Umar Hadid [right] (source)
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 30, 2017
A profile of Umar Hadid, published on an Islamic State forum, is reproduced below with some interesting and important sections highlighted in bold. Hadid—variously known as Abu Khattab al-Falluji, Abu Khattab al-Ansari, and Abu Khattab al-Iraqi—was a native of Fallujah who took up Salafism in the late 1990s during the rule of Saddam Husayn, leading to clashes with the security forces and Hadid going into internal exile. After the fall of Saddam, Hadid quickly linked up with the elite circles of the nascent Islamic State movement, including its leader Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), his deputy Umar Yusef al-Juma (Abu Anas al-Shami), the military leader Mustafa Ramadan Darwish (Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani) and Abu Raghd who set up the Rawa Camp in Anbar Province, said to be the first terrorist training facility of the Iraqi jihad, and Abdallah Najem al-Jawari (Abu Azzam al-Iraqi), the chief financier and Anbar governor in 2004 before being appointed emir of Baghdad in 2005. Hadid was the leader of the insurgency in the two battles at Fallujah in 2004, being killed during the second of them. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 28, 2017
In his first speech as the then-Islamic State of Iraq’s (ISI’s) official spokesman in August 2011, Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) referred to several of the group’s “leaders” who had been killed. Among them was Abu Raghd, whose biography provides a glimpse of the role regional states—specifically Saddam Husayn’s Iraq and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria—played in facilitating the birth of the Islamic State (IS). Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 22, 2017
Mustafa Ramdan Darwish (Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani)
After the leaders of the Islamic State die—usually killed by their foes—short biographies tend to be circulated on internet forums that favour the group. One such obituary—with the above picture—was disseminated for Mustafa Ramadan Darwish (Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani), and is reproduced below with some editions to transliteration and some interesting sections highlighted in bold. Darwish was the first leader of the Islamic State’s military portfolio and the second overall deputy (between September 2004 and early 2005) to the movement’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). One of the most interesting parts of Darwish’s profile is its addition of details on the jihadi networks linked to al-Qaeda and the first generation of the Islamic State that were operating in Iraq in the final years of Saddam Husayn’s rule, a topic touched on in other biographies of Islamic State leaders. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 18, 2016
Obituary for Abdurrahman al-Qaduli in the German version of Rumiya, 11 November 2016
The forty-first edition of the Islamic State’s newsletter, al-Naba, was released within the territory of the caliphate on 30 July 2016 and released online on 2 August; it and the forty-third edition (released 13 and 16 August) contained an obituary for Abdurrahman al-Qaduli (Abu Ali al-Anbari), the caliph’s deputy, who was killed on 25 March. The obituaries were entitled, “The Worshipping Scholar and the Mujahid Preacher: Shaykh Abu Ali al-Anbari”. The German version of the third issue of the Islamic State’s Rumiyah magazine on 11 November contained this obituary. Below is a very rough translation. Some interesting or important sections have been highlighted in bold. The subheadings are mine.
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