“Al-Qaeda inmates say ISIS does not represent the Way of the Prophet”
Washington: A terrorist attack on the World Trade Center carried out on February 26, 1993 killed six and injured over 1,000 people.
Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorist in this attack has been imprisoned on account of his coordination in carrying out the attack.
Shockingly, a terrorist himself, Ramiz Yousef has admitted the actuality of ISIS which seems to be conflicting with the perspective of this world.
Yousef is one of six suspects convicted for their roles in the attack. A seventh suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin, has yet to be apprehended for his role in the attack.
During an interview with The Sentinel, Bernard Kleinman, a lawyer who represents Yousef and a handful of other al-Qaeda terrorists, admitted: “Many of my clients hold a dim view of ISIS, they call it ‘a corruption of Islam’ and greatly destructive to their religion”
According to Kleinman, his clients take issue with how ISIS and their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi treat the rift between Sunni and Shi’a Islam.
Whereas al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden attempted to end the violence by encouraging Shi’a Muslims to convert. On the other side Al-Baghdadi views Shi’a Muslims as apostates who must be killed.
“The alleged Al-Qaeda inmates I’ve spoken to do not see ISIS as representing the Way of the Prophet. That includes both convicted al-Qaeda members and alleged members of al-Qaeda, both in the U.S. and at Guantanamo, who have spoken to me about this since the rise of ISIS in 2014,” said Kleinman.
“You have to understand that whether at the Supermax facility or down in Guantanamo, they have access to news and watch channels such as CNN, so they know what’s going on”
While most of Kleinman’s clients don’t approve of the actions of ISIS, Ramzi Yousef has gone a step further than his co-conspirators, penning a 250-page essay arguing against the group in hopes that the U.S. government may utilize his work to discourage young Muslims from joining the group.
“Yousef has made clear he does not expect any quid pro quo. He knows he is going to die in federal prison, although of course, he would prefer not to be subject to the Special Administrative Measures he is currently under in Colorado,” Kleinman said.
“But he has made clear to me that he has devoted his efforts to this project solely, and I believe him, on the basis that he believes that ISIS does great harm to Islam throughout the world.”
Despite Yousef’s best efforts, the U.S. government has so far declined to utilize his work. Kleinman explained that he views this as a missed opportunity:
“I think it would be a waste for the United States, or the West, not to somehow try to make use of this treatise. Of course, ISIS will make the argument he has been pressured or coerced to write this because he is in U.S. custody, but this is a theological argument being made by Yousef which, to some degree, has to be taken on its own merits in terms of the religious argument and the citations of the Qur’an and the hadith.
And if you can create doubt in just one wannabe ISIS recruit about the religious legitimacy of ISIS’s actions, and by doing that save lives, then I think it would be worth it. ISIS, after all, has been lionizing figures such as Ramzi Yousef for years and other al-Qaeda parties in custody, notwithstanding these individuals’ inability to control what is written about them in their propaganda—for example, using Ramzi’s detention as a recruiting tool in ISIS’s English language online magazine, Dabiq.”