The Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI) released a new edition today of one of their magazines (al-Fursan). In this 40 paged magazine there is a wide variety of topics, such as the “objectives for the new year”, “what is the victory [for], if one doesn’t serve God?” or “the scent of the shuhada.”
Description and assignment to the beginnings of the war in Islam
As usual, magazines as such, are to serve practical purposes besides the “religious” and “political” chit-chat.
What to do, when one is thrown into prison – a personal report from Iraq. “It [being imprisoned] is inevitable for the temptation and the trial” on which the mujahidin tread – a often used jihadi-rhetoric following the belief that one is fighting for the cause of God and as such every test and every temptation is an experiment, which the faithful must withstand; “just like the bloddshed in the streets.” “This recent experiment goes by in the prisons, and always one with oneself in this regard – there I wasn’t in a big shock (except that I was seperated from my wife and children and that there were news from them… the devil let’s you rott in these regards). My house was raided (11 men and one women where inside).” The Author goes with some details of his arrest. “There is no doubt, that the situation is difficult in the first days [in prison]… this is something new for you.”
“My Brother, you must know that Yusuf was imprisoned… Imam as-Sunna, Ahmad b. Hanbal was imprisoned… Sheikh al-Islam, Ibn Taymiyya, was imprisoned – so who are you, even if you are angry with what God has decided, who has decreed over you, before he had created the world (…) you must know, that you will not exit [the prison] until God wants you to.” The author goes in narrating from his perspective how God has made him firm, even when “they took me to confess, I prayed to God that he would make me strong.”
Recently there has been a number of online sources dealing with “our imprisoned brothers”, a couple of months ago a video surfaced in the radical-islamic forums how the Israeli Defense Force arrested a number of administrators in Gaza. Imprisonment has always been a very important issue in the jihad literature, arabic reports from the shuhada’ in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Hurks provided some insight, but a significant document ist the memorandum issued by Sawt al-Jihad after the arrest of one of al-Qa’ida’s chef ideologes Salman Faris az-Zahrani (a.k.a. Abu Jandal) where the exact same rethoric is used.
Online Jihad: Monitoring Jihadist Online Communities 