Syria Rebels Turn Against Most Radical Group Tied to Al Qaeda
By ANNE BARNARD, JAN. 12, 2014
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As a government warplane soared over the northern Syrian city of Raqqa recently, a fighter from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the country’s most radical group linked to Al Qaeda, watched from behind an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck. Fighters and activists from rival insurgent factions urged him to fire. He did not.
The others were incredulous, recalled one, who supports the Nusra Front, a rival group that has Al Qaeda’s official stamp of approval as its representative in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad. But the man on the truck replied, “We are here to establish the Islamic state, not to fight Assad.”
Such disputes helped set off the infighting that has swept insurgent-held northern Syria for the past week, leaving more than 500 dead, as a broad array of factions have turned against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, in a showdown over tactics, power and ideology within a Sunni jihadist movement that has drawn fighters from across the world.
The dispute has reverberated far beyond Syria’s borders, analysts say, for instance carving the same divisions in the jihadist movement in Egypt between pragmatists and ideological purists from the austere Salafist movement.
(More here.)
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As a government warplane soared over the northern Syrian city of Raqqa recently, a fighter from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the country’s most radical group linked to Al Qaeda, watched from behind an antiaircraft gun mounted on a pickup truck. Fighters and activists from rival insurgent factions urged him to fire. He did not.
The others were incredulous, recalled one, who supports the Nusra Front, a rival group that has Al Qaeda’s official stamp of approval as its representative in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad. But the man on the truck replied, “We are here to establish the Islamic state, not to fight Assad.”
Such disputes helped set off the infighting that has swept insurgent-held northern Syria for the past week, leaving more than 500 dead, as a broad array of factions have turned against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, in a showdown over tactics, power and ideology within a Sunni jihadist movement that has drawn fighters from across the world.
The dispute has reverberated far beyond Syria’s borders, analysts say, for instance carving the same divisions in the jihadist movement in Egypt between pragmatists and ideological purists from the austere Salafist movement.
(More here.)
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