Sunni vs. shiite which is al qaeda

These are already serious selling points. And Hezbollah will score a major propaganda victory in the Muslim world if it simply remains standing in Lebanon after the present bout of warfare is over and maintains the relationships it is forging with Hamas and other Sunni Islamist organizations.

What will such a victory mean? Rumblings against Israeli actions in Lebanon from both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq already suggest such an outcome. That may be good news for Iraqis, but it marks a dangerous turn for the West. And there are darker implications still.

The conflict morphed into a Saudi-Iranian proxy war not because of ancient or durable sectarian identities. Iran, presented with an unexpected opportunity, obliged. This is geopolitics more than sectarianism, strategic rivalry more than religious competition. When that war ends, tensions surrounding southern secessionists, Al Qaeda, ISIS , and Salafis, all Sunnis, will likely rage, exacerbated by Saudi-Emirati ambitions, divergence, and rivalry.

The latest, most covered, and vivid act of violence, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi , is also an internal Sunni affair. The slain journalist was Sunni. The perpetrators were Sunni. Turkey, the country in which the assassination took place and that played an instrumental role in leaking information about the culprits, is predominantly Sunni as well. The backdrop to the killing is the tug-of-war among variants of Sunni Islam: the ascetic Wahhabis, the activist Muslim Brotherhood, and the statist neo-Ottomans, each competing for leadership.

The list goes on. Hezbollah actually increased the number of Sunni allies it has in Parliament and in the Lebanese government in the aftermath of its intervention in the Syrian civil war against Sunni rebels. Shiites are not involved in the bitter inter-Palestinian rift between Fatah and Hamas. The Turkish campaign against the Kurds, likewise, is an intra-Sunni affair. The continued chaos in Libya, where there is no relevant sectarian fault line, stems from ethnic, tribal, or regional rivalries among Sunnis, as do clashes in western Iraq and geographic tensions between the Tunisian coast and hinterlands.

In Iraq, intra-Shiite tensions define the political space today and may play a more important role in shaping future politics than the sectarian divide. Amid the recent upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon, the Shiite enclaves in the south of both countries, although bordered by Sunni communities, experienced no major attacks or threats from their Sunni neighbors.

There is, of course, a Sunni-Shiite divide. And part of it is basic strategy: by controlling territory it can build an army, and by using its army it can control more territory. Al Qaeda in theory supports a caliphate, but Zawahiri envisioned this as a long-term goal. Back in the day, although bin Laden and Zawahiri supported AQI publicly, in private they did not approve of its declaration of an Islamic state in Iraq. In particular, Zawahiri feared that AQI was putting the cart before the horse: you need full control over territory and popular support before proclaiming an Islamic state, not the other way around.

Al Qaeda has never shown much interest in taking or holding territory in order to set up an Islamic state and govern, despite the fact that doing so is one of its stated goals; on the contrary, the only reason it has ever shown interest in territory is as a safe haven and as a place to set up training camps. For example, although Al Qaeda declared the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to be the caliph of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda leadership never showed any interest in trying to become part of the governing apparatus of the Taliban.

Rather, it used its safe haven in Taliban territory as a base from which to plan additional attacks against the United States and support other jihadists in their fights against area regimes. Al Qaeda has long favored large-scale, dramatic attacks against strategic or symbolic targets. At the same time, Al Qaeda has backed an array of smaller terrorist attacks on Western, Jewish and other enemy targets, trained insurgents and otherwise tried to build guerrilla armies.

Yet although Al Qaeda has repeatedly called for attacks against Westerners, and especially Americans, it has refrained from killing Westerners when it suited its purposes. The Islamic State evolved out of the civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and its tactics reflect this context.

The Islamic State seeks to conquer, and thus it deploys artillery, massed forces and even tanks as it sweeps into new areas or defends existing holdings. Terrorism, in this context, is part of revolutionary war: it is used to undermine morale in the army and police, force a sectarian backlash or otherwise create dynamics that help conquest on the ground. But it is an adjunct to a more conventional struggle.

This mix earns them some support, or at least acquiescence, from the population. Al Qaeda, in contrast, favors a more measured approach. A decade ago Zawahiri chastised the Iraqi jihadists for their brutality, correctly believing this would turn the population against them and alienate the broader Muslim community, and he has raised this issue in the current conflict as well.

The leaders and members of the Islamic State are a generation younger than those of Al Qaeda Baghdadi is believed to be around forty-three years old, whereas Zawahiri is sixty-three years old , and the generation gap shows. Some of its propaganda comes from the top, but much is generated from below, enabling it to crowdsource jihad—recruiters even encourage incoming fighters to bring their smart phones with them so they can share their exploits on the battlefield on Twitter and Instagram.

Indeed, Islamic State supporters reportedly were behind the January hacking of the U. Central Command Twitter feed. But the Al Qaeda core still mostly produces variants of the same tired old content it has been putting out since —long videos featuring senior Al Qaeda ideologues pontificating about various aspects of jihad and quoting extensively from the Koran.

Compare this to the video released by the Islamic State titled Flames of War, which features rousing music; dramatic explosions; clips of Barack Obama and George W. Bush overlaid with CGI flames; footage of jihadists firing RPGs in the midst of battle; graphic, blood-soaked images of dead enemies; and a voice-over in English, of course, with Arabic subtitles detailing the glorious rise of the Islamic State. Which do you think is more likely to attract the attention of an eighteen-year-old dreaming of adventure and glory?

In March , on one of those frequent trips, Anbari was killed near the Syrian city of Shaddadi, along the Syrian-Iraqi border. According to the biography, American soldiers attempted to capture him in a raid but he blew himself up using a suicide belt. Anbari outlived Zarqawi by 10 years, and out-influenced him.

He had, for example, around a dozen noms de guerre. For many years the U. Officials had only two pictures of him. When he was captured briefly in Mosul in , his U. The second time he was captured, in , they recognized him but only as the local terrorist cleric from Tal Afar, rather than as the leader of the al-Qaeda—dominated Mujahideen Shura Council.

People near him built the strategy of what he wanted to achieve. Husham Alhashimi, an Iraqi historian of jihadist groups who advises the Iraqi government on ISIS , studied the insurgency against the United States up close from the outset. They had similar profiles to Anbari in terms of religious training and were all wanted by the former regime for their extremist ideas and activities: Abu Abdulrahman al-Iraqi, a former aide to Zarqawi who currently in jail; Nidham Addin Rifaai, who was imprisoned several times, starting in , for involvement in the Salafi Monotheists Movement and who is also currently in jail; and Abdullah Abdelsamad al-Mufti, who has been wanted since and who is a highly regarded Salafi ideologue in Iraq.

Alhashimi said these Iraqi jihadist clerics advanced ideas eventually rejected by al-Qaeda but embraced by ISIS , including extreme sectarianism and the concept of establishing an Islamic state. He was the longest-serving and highest-ranking cleric within the organization since its inception until his death. Recognizing the central role of Anbari in the formation of ISIS , and of the events that cultivated leaders like him before the invasion, establishes that the group was not merely the creation of one cunning Jordanian jihadist.

It seems that Zarqawi landed in a country where the ideological contours of the group he would one day lead had already been defined. He was influenced by the existing environment and by the native ideologues who shaped it before him.

The distinction matters.