Syria Opinion: The Danger of Confusing "Islamists" and "Jihadists" (Khan)
Saturday, April 13, 2013 at 7:24Mass demonstration last month in Raqqa, soon after the city was taken by insurgent forces including Islamists
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The commander --- a Dutch dentist of Syrian origin who called himself simply ‘Doctor’ --- was a member of the Ahrar al-Sham, the most powerful Islamist group in the vast array of factions fighting against the Syrian regime. His was a common perspective amongst the Salafi Islamists I met in northern Syria: measured, well-thought out and intellectually consistent, drawing on the realities of a war inexorably descending into factional chaos. Syria is on a knife’s edge, they told me. The regime will fall but most didn’t expect the fighting to end there. They feared a larger sectarian war and were practically begging the international community to help them prevent it.
It was a stark contrast to the few jihadists I encountered, whose only cerebral quality seemed to be their proficiency with weapons. Those men, aligned with the al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al -Nusra, spoke in terms familiar to a Western audience: global jihad, the re-establishment of the Caliphate, and, most frighteningly, perpetual war until their rule over Muslims is achieved.
Conflating the two groups is like mixing Christian fundamentalists with the Amish. And yet, Western governments continually cringe at the thought of Islamists, particularly Salafis, gaining a foothold in the various revolutions playing out in the so-called Arab Spring.