Abu Ali al-Anbari: "They came to die."

Below is a translated snippet from jihadist evangelist and fundraiser Abdullah al-Muheisini’s testimony case against ISIS’s irreligious conduct and the events leading to January 2014’s explosion of fighting between Syria’s rebels and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Al-Muheisini’s account is republished from a Telegram group in which he argued his case against ISIS’s conduct with a number of ISIS supporters. In this excerpt, al-Muheisini unsuccessfully appeals to ISIS second-in-command “Abu Ali al-Anbari” to put a stop to the car bombs ISIS was deploying against Syrian rebels. The episode apparently took place after ISIS hit Liwa al-Tawhid’s Infantry School base with car bombs on February 1, 2014.

I don’t if there’s a bigger lesson to take from this, I mostly just thought it was a pretty wild anecdote about al-Anbari. (Who is now dead.)

Another episode: They [ISIS] sent car bombs [whose aftermath] I witnessed at the Infantry School [in Aleppo]. All of them were outside the school. And a third was in Ourum, where they targeted a checkpoint that belonged to [Harakat Nour al-Din] al-Zinki. A young man was killed, 17 years old, who had nothing to do with it.

So I went to go to [Abu Ali] al-Anbari, the second-in-command in the State, and I said to him, “Sheikh, get matters under control. Fear God for the sake of Muhammad’s nation.”

“We’ve experienced wars,” he said.

I said, “You have the politics of war, but we, as students of knowledge, we’re concerned with the matter of [religious] law! These car bombs are impermissible, they’re killing innocents.” And I told him the events I’d witnessed.

And he said something that would make mountains shake, and this is something to which I will swear. He said, “A car bombs kills twenty, and then the rest are terrified.”

I said, “Your men are killing themselves! They’re not even hurting those you call ‘apostates.’”

“The terror is enough,” he said.

And when things came close to exploding, I said, “Sheikh, save those with you and agree to a court that will rule between by God’s law. The brothers are being killed.”

And he said, “They came to die.”

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