Seen as bid to reclaim jehadi spotlight from ISIS
Al Qaeda’s grandiose announcement of opening a new branch to “raise the flag of jehad” across the Indian subcontinent is being viewed by some American analysts as a “posturing” exercise in a desperate bid to reclaim its declining jehadi spotlight from the ruthless ISIS.
Deriding the 55-minute video containing the Al Qaeda announcement as “hyperventilation and posturing”, CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen commented: “It’s al-Zawahiri’s obvious way of getting some of the limelight back”.
Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, noted that Al Qaeda is unlikely to win over constituents with this announcement by its chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on the creation of “Qaedat al-Jehad in the Indian Subcontinent” and outlining plans to “raise the flags of jihad” in parts of India, Myanmar and Bangladesh.
“They are losing a lot of constituents to the Islamic State,” Haykel said, adding: “They’re trying to show their global reach as an organisation, but I’m not sure of exactly what sign they are trying to send.”
laith Alkhouri, a senior analyst at the New York-based Flashpoint Global Partners that tracks militant websites has termed the Al Qaeda announcement “a serious counter-narrative to the ISIS expansion”. Alkhouri told The New York Times: “Al-Zawahiri is establishing an antithesis to ISIS and its ideology, a message to Mujahideen unify together, not kill Muslims and kill each other, and, keep the focus of the attacks on Western powers.”
Fawas Gerges, a Middle East expert at the london School of Economics, also attributes the Al Qaeda’s Indian push to its rivalry with ISIS. Gerges has been quoted by The Associated Press as saying: “This is really very personal. You cannot understand this announcement without understanding the fierce rivalry between Islamic State and Al Qaeda central.”
At a time when the United States is preoccupied with the challenge posed by ISIS with its recent beheading of two American journalists in apparent retaliation for US airstrikes targeting in Iraq, the talk among commentators has been that ISIS has effectively dislodged Al Qaeda as the foremost terror threat.
A little over two months after the ISIS publicly advanced the “Caliphate” theme, declaring its leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi as the “Caliph” of all Muslims, al-Zawahiri asserts in the video that the purpose of creating the Indian entity is “to call the Ummah to unite round the word of Tawhid (monotheism), to wage jehad against its enemies, to liberate its land, to restore its sovereignty, and to revive its Caliphate”.