Geopolitician and essayist Frédéric Encel analyzes the repercussions of the new shockwave shaking the Middle East after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the rise to power of an Islamist coalition led by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, a former figure of ISIS and al-Qaeda.
The revolution is underway in Damascus. Once again, in the Arab world, history takes a dramatic turn, and the Syrian people hold their breath. Bashar al-Assad has fled the country, and Islamists have seized power. What lies ahead? The battalions led by Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, a former jihadist of ISIS and then al-Qaeda – whom he allegedly parted ways with in 2016 – thank Allah from the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a radiant symbol of Sunni Islam. These images will go down in history, though no one knows how it will unfold.
Sociologist, Iranologist and political scientist on the contemporary Muslim world, Amélie Myriam Chelly is the acclaimed author of an excellent Dictionnaire des islamismes (Éditions du Cerf, 2021). She has just published, with the same publisher, a “documentary novel” entitled “Le Coran de sang”. Interview.
Deprived of its former bases in the Iraqi-Syrian areas, ISIS is retreating into the Internet. A trend accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which incites the terrorist organisation to intensify its online activity.
Let’s say it outright, the only difference between the brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS is the method. The end remains the same: to apply the Islamiya Sharia, the Islamic law, and to re-establish the caliphate, by appointing a caliph in the Islamic way, without a vote. Once this is done, they work on Islamising the existence and dominating the world. Thus, two fundamentalist entities do each other favours often consciously, sometimes unconsciously.
According to a UN report, ISIS still has an estimated $30-45 million war chest. The report states that this is mainly cash, but notes that some of it has been converted into investments, via nominees, in Iraq, Syria and especially Turkey.
According to a report by the National Intelligence Council, submitted to President Macron, on the French ISIS fighters exfiltered from Syria, some 40 of them have joined jihadist groups in Libya. As a result of this geographical rapprochement, they are a major source of concern, as they could fuel plans for illegal returns to France.
The appointments at the head of ISIS, following the death of its “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and its spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, confirm the growing control of AMNI, the former intelligence service of the Caliphate, over the terrorist organization’s governing bodies.
Far from having put an end to ISIS’s existence or even its power of nuisance, the death of its self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – killed on last October 27, during an operation by American special forces in northern Syria – will accelerate two trends in the making for several months, within the new Jihadist International: the first is structural, the second one is operational.
The deadly attack on October 3 at the very heart of the intelligence directorate, at the Paris police prefecture, illustrated in the most dramatic way the phenomenon we mentioned in the first of this series of articles devoted to the new anti-terrorist challenges. Namely, this type of terrorist acts is no longer the work of commandos attacking France from the fiefdoms of ISIS in Iraqi-Syrian jihadist areas, but is the poisoned fruit of spontaneous “jihadist vocations”, generated at a distance, by recruiters of ISIS, among French “subjects” most often motivated by violent nihilistic impulses, more than by a real desire for a jihadist “holy war”.
