ICC Note:
“Earlier this month, the French daily Libération published an interview with Sheikh Louay al-Zouabi, a self-avowed Salafist imam from Daraa, Syria, who claims to have issued a fatwa that sparked the uprising against the rule of Bashar al-Assad,” the Stonegate Institute reports.
By John Rosenthal
2/29/2012 Syria (Stonegate Institute) – Earlier this month, the French daily Libération published an interview with Sheikh Louay al-Zouabi, a self-avowed Salafist imam from Daraa, Syria, who claims to have issued a fatwa that sparked the uprising against the rule of Bashar al-Assad.
A radical fundamentalist current in Islam, Salafism advocates the emulation of the Salaf: the earliest generations of Muhammad’s companions and followers. It is the same form of Islam as that embraced by al-Qaeda, to whose ideas al-Zouabi has elsewhere unabashedly said he adheres.
Asked how the “intifada” in Daraa began, al-Zouabi told Libération:
[It began] with the arrest and torture of a dozen children – the oldest was twelve years old – who had written “The people want to overthrow the government” on the walls. The fathers of the children then wanted to negotiate their release with the security forces. They were told: “If you come back, you are going to be arrested and we are going to make your wives kiss our feet.” A female lawyer who wanted to defend the children was put in prison and they shaved her head, which is more unacceptable than killing her. It was this that brought people out onto the streets on March 20.
According to al-Zouabi, security forces fired on the protestors, killing six. It was in response to these events, he says, that he issued his fatwa calling for the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
In a separate interview last November with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, al-Zouabi admitted to having fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia: two of the historical hotspots of jihad. An article in the English-language Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star notes, moreover, that he “lived in Sudan at the same time as former Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.” Bin Laden moved operations from Afghanistan to Sudan after the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, before returning to Afghanistan in 1996.
In conversation with The Daily Star, al-Zouabi not only admitted to “sharing many of al-Qaeda’s beliefs,” but stated outright, “I am Al-Qaeda except that I am willing to talk [to Christians] and I oppose the killing of innocents.” Al-Zouabi says that he opposed the 9/11 attacks, but supported the “resistance” against U.S. forces in Iraq.
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