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life that it could damage the reputation of Al Qaeda,” listing as some of the acts that were beyond the pale “the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon, bombing mosques and a massacre in a Catholic church in Baghdad.” 25
     
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    FLUIDITY

    On April 16, 2015, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a Muslim who lived in Columbus, Ohio, was indicted for plotting to carry out a jihad terror attack in the United States—he had talked about attacking a military base and murdering American soldiers “execution style.” 20
    Mohamud had returned to the United States from Syria, where he had received training from Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda group that Ayman al-Zawahiri had insisted that ISIS defer to in Syria—leading directly to the split between the two groups.
    Before he left for Syria, Mohamud posted on his Facebook page the black flag of jihad in the design that has become associated with the Islamic State, as well as another photograph also containing the Islamic State symbol. Authorities said that he went to Syria intending to join the Islamic State, but ended up in Jabhat al-Nusra instead. 21 Exactly how and why this happened is unclear, but it does indicate that the gulf between the two groups is not so wide as to prevent jihadis from moving from one to the other. They share the same religious perspectives, ideology, and goals, and that’s good enough.
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    The al-Qaeda letter did complain about some of the bloody tactics ISIS was using. But its putative author, al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn, better known as “Azzam the American,” seemed chiefly concerned with the PR fallout. The massacre of Catholics at the church in Baghdad, for example, had come at a particularly inopportune moment—just as the author of the letter was doing the preparatory research for an appeal to fast-secularizing Irish Catholics to embrace Islam. He had also been “thinking of preparing an Arabic message to the Christians of the Arab region, calling them to Islam, and to caution them from cooperating with invader enemies of Islam who oppose the Islamic State.” 26 So the timing was terrible.
     
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    GEE, I WONDER WHY CATHOLICS AREN’T RUSHING TO CONVERT TO ISLAM?

    “The Catholics are a fertile ground for call of God and to persuade them about the just case of the Mujahidin, particularly after the rage expanding against the mother church (Vatican) as a result of its scandals. . . . But the attacks on the Christians in Iraq, like the Baghdad attack and what took place earlier in Mosul and others, does not help us to convey the message. Even if the ones we are talking to have some grudge against the mother church, they will not grasp in general the targeting of their public, women, children and men in their church during Mass.”
    —from pages 6–7 of the twenty-one-page 2011 al-Qaeda letter detailing differences with ISIS
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    The Obama administration and the media were taking a dispute primarily about timing and tactics and making it into something that it clearly wasn’t: a principled condemnation of the world’s most notorious terror group of the 2010s by the most notorious terror group of the 2000s on the grounds that it had transgressed the bounds of Islamic law. 27
     
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    OSTRICH ALERT

    “It is a corruption of the Islamic faith. It is a distortion of it. It does not represent the Muslim community or Islam.”
    —CIA Director John Brennan, explaining how ISIS is not Islamic 28
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    Steamrolling to the Caliphate
    The split with al-Qaeda did not slow ISIS down. On June 10, 2014, ISIS jihadis posted online photos of the bulldozing of the Syria-Iraq border, under the title “Smashing the Sykes-Picot border.” 29 They were referring to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which had delineated the British and French spheres of influence in the post–World War I Middle East, with France getting Syria and northern Iraq and Britain, southern Iraq—and thus had ultimately demarcated the border between the nations of Syria