The Islamic State and al-Qaeda: Threat Inflation and Conflation
ISIS Media Hub twitter photo, 7/5/2013
Today, large areas of the Iraq-Syria border region remain under control of the Islamic State, a violent Salafi jihadist organization that has declared the territory a new caliphate under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Members of the Obama Administration appeared before Congress this week to testify about the organization and the threat it poses – but at times this testimony conflated the Islamic State with al-Qaeda, which has disowned the Islamic State, and overstated the threat it poses to the United States. These inaccuracies are not just misleading, but could have dangerous effects in how members of the U.S. government and public perceive the organization and how the laws authorizing U.S. military force apply to the Islamic State.
Claiming the Islamic State is al-Qaeda, or worse than al-Qaeda, is a dangerous inflation of the threat. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday that the Islamic State “is al-Qaeda. It may have changed its name. It may have broken with senior al-Qaeda leadership such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, but it is al-Qaeda in its doctrine, ambition, and increasingly its threat to U.S. interests.” The day before, McGurk told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the Islamic State is not only al-Qaeda, but in fact “worse than al-Qaeda,” and that it is “no longer simply a terrorist organization. It is now a full-blown army seeking to establish a self-governing state.” This reductionism obscures what the Islamic State truly is and the threat it poses to the United States and its interests. [Brett McGurk, 7/23/14 and 7/24/14]
The Islamic State is a militant Salafi jihadist terrorist organization, but it is not al-Qaeda. At times in its history, the Islamic State has been affiliated with al-Qaeda, even changing its name to al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2004 to 2006, but its relationship with the al-Qaeda leadership was always contentious. Since the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the Islamic State has challenged al-Qaeda and its other affiliates in the region, most notably Jabhat al-Nusrah, for influence in Syria and for leadership of the global jihadist movement. This infighting led al-Qaeda’s leadership to excommunicate the Islamic State from al-Qaeda. The Islamic State is not, by al-Qaeda’s own definition of its network, a component organization of al-Qaeda.
The Islamic State has a large and capable militia that has seized territory, but this does not distinguish it from other terrorist groups. The Islamic State’s large fighting force, estimated last month to include approximately 10,000 militiamen, and declaration of a sovereign state spanning the Syria-Iraq border do not fundamentally differ from previous terrorist operations. In fact, its efforts to establish a state are illustrative of a jihadist trend of shifting the focus of attacks from the United States to Middle Eastern governments. In 2011, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seized several towns in Yemen, and in 2012, a coalition of jihadist groups captured a large swathe of Mali. In both instances, the jihadist groups declared their territory to be independent emirates, but their radicalism alienated local populations and their proto-states suffered from their own inability to govern. Eventually, both of these jihadist occupations were ended by ground offensives by the Yemeni and Malian militaries backed by Western intelligence and air support. The Islamic State’s seizure of territory only departs from these previous efforts in the ambitious – or hubristic – size of its proposed state.
Conflating the Islamic State and al-Qaeda leads to dangerous threat inflation. As Jeremy Shapiro, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote about the hazards of misusing the al-Qaeda label, “according to Senator John McCain, ISIS advances in northwestern Iraq represent ‘an existential threat to the security of the United States of America.’ But ISIS doesn’t actually represent any sort of threat to the security of the United States—at least, not yet.
“With such an expansive definition of Al Qaeda within U.S. political culture, it has become impossible for the government to convince Americans that the 2012 attack against the U.S. mission in Benghazi was not an Al Qaeda operation…Even worse, the U.S. government doesn’t seem to be able to convince itself that some of these so-called affiliates are not a threat to the United States. Thus, we find ourselves spending our limited resources fighting groups that at times may have adopted the Al Qaeda name or espoused views that share similarities with Al Qaeda’s ideology but that have neither the desire nor the capabilities to threaten the United States. But the more we label these groups ‘the enemy’ (which is what the Al Qaeda label really means) and get involved in their local conflicts, the more likely it is that they will eventually start to see the United States as an attractive target and become real enemies.” [Jeremy Shapiro, 7/13/14]
Claiming that the Islamic State “is al-Qaeda” further muddles the legal authorities for targeting the organization. There are three potential legal authorities the Obama Administration might use to justify military strikes against the Islamic State: the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda and its associates, the 2002 AUMF that authorized the war in Iraq, and the president’s Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief. None of these provides an assured legal and political basis for military action. The Iraq AUMF is arguably the most legally sound, but the Obama Administration supports its repeal and relying on it to strike the Islamic State would be politically opportunistic. Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, has written that support for using Article II authority also rests on a tenuous argument. But the 2001 AUMF, which only authorizes strikes against al-Qaeda and its associated forces, is the least convincing justification. McGurk’s false statement that the Islamic State “is al-Qaeda” could be misconstrued to suggest that the 2001 AUMF applies to the Islamic State, an organization that al-Qaeda rejects, setting an odd and dangerous precedent that organizations can be targeted under the law based on ideology instead of affiliation. The Islamic State is not an associated force of al-Qaeda, and therefore should not be covered by the 2001 AUMF.
