The title may be misleading, how can I use the term comrade for the Jund Ansar Allah (JAA) ‘martyrs’? Well, with the – as usual – picturesque propaganda machinery of individual users who disseminate their user generated content after acquiring a picture or two, some propaganda posters do seem familiar from historical documents…
On 10 January 2010 more members of the JAA had been killed, according to the propagandistic outlets, and are commemorated in mostly jpeg formats online. The attention turned once again to the JAA, who in August under the leadership of Rafah based cleric Abu Nur al-Maqdisi (Abd al-Latif Musa) declared an Islamic Caliphate following AQ principles and guidelines in Gaza. Naturally, Hamas didn’t like the idea and its al-Qassam Brigades moved in, swept the mosque and killed pretty much anyone they could find. Since then Hamas is clearly just another “idol” serving the “Jews and Crusaders” and so on. The Ibn Taymiya mosque had been seriously damaged by Hamas forces.
An audio file, the recorded testimony of Hasan al-Qartrawi – aka Abu Maslama – was disseminated together with plenty of pictures. All of this material was declared as JAA and part of the August 2009 declaration of the Islamic Emirate in Gaza. He was killed in an Israeli strike together with at least two other Mujahideen (Awd Abu Nasir and Yusuf Musa).
Other outlets, however, have declared that Qatrawi was a member of their brigade, the al-Quds Brigade – the military wing of the Palestinian Jihad, who published a statement on their website. Another pro Palestinian Jihad forum issued the following, probably taken from Arabic news sources:
“Three Palestinians were ‘martyred’ during the evening of 10 January 2010 in Gaza by Zionist strikes targeting a group of fighters in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian medical sources in Gaza said that the three ‘martyrs’ are: Awd Nasir, Hasan al-Qatrawi and Hadhifat al-Hams, members of the al-Quds Brigade, the military wing of the Palestinian Jihad. The three fighters had been killed, four have been critically wounded in the Zionist air strike in the Abu al-Ajayn region in the middle of the Gaza Strip.(…) Hasan al-Qatrawi (22) was from the al-Barij refugee camp, Hadhifa (23) had been from the al-Nasirat camp.”
Some of the pictures disseminated are clearly tagged as JAA, ISI and the usual AQ fashion:
Another example of user generated content, incorporated is AQ Iraq’s logo of the “Islamic State of Iraq”. JAA considers itself part of AQ’s global campaign with Palestine as a future zone of the future-caliphate. But beware, this picture surfaced in the usual AQ affiliated jihadist forums and has been tagged according to the particular JAA and AQ ideology. This must not mean that al-Qatrawi was indeed a member of JAA but his death and his rank are simply being exploited by JAA sympathizers and fueled into pro-AQ jihadist forums.
The forums also disseminated pictures like these:
Again, clearly tagging the killed as JAA members adherent to ISI / AQ global ideology. “Assassinated by the hand of the forces of the Zionists during the evening of Sunday on 20 January 2010.”
Furthermore it is claimed that he was “one of the students of Shaykh Abu Nur al-Maqdisi”.
Marked in this picture
This picture may ‘prove’ the ideological proximity of the fighters to the JAA or perhaps indicate either their sympathy or switch to the JAA? Or is Palestinian Jihad in Gaza cooperating with JAA?
And also untagged pictures like these were published, claiming that these two had been members of JAA as well. Pictures like this one have in the mean time inspired more JAA tagged pictures, reinforcing the claim that JAA is still alive and operating in Gaza despite the Hamas raids in August.
The disseminated testimony of al-Qatrawi, as it is claimed and as it was published in jihadist forums, contains partially the adherence to AQ’s global strategy.
The need for “the sword” is emphasized just as much as his need to fight. This contains the ‘why we fight’ section, where he states that “we don’t fight due to the state of the Arab idol [Arab regimes] or the emplacement of the Western idol, not due to the drawn borders of the Sykes-Picot pact, but we fight for that the highest may be the word of God. So the American Muslim is our beloved brother, the Palestinian apostate is our enemy.”
He sends out a message to the other jihad hotspots naming Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Kashmir and states “that your blood is our blood; your wounded are our wounded. By God we won’t abandon you” fighting till the very end. The leadership of AQ is praised and paid allegiance to, UBL, Zawahiri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi are named and cherished as “the command of the global Jihad”.
Online Jihad: Monitoring Jihadist Online Communities 