Osama bin Laden was not quite comfortable with the then rising new Islamic extremist group warning its extreme brutality could damage al-Qaeda’s reputation, The Daily Mail claimed quoting a 21-page letter found at bin Laden’s compound after his killing.
The document urged the Al-Qaeda to cut all ties with the Islamic State group, known at that time as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS), the Daily Mail reported.
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The letter listed the violent crimes committed by the ISIS as reasons why Al-Qaeda should cut the connection with the group, among them the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon, bombing mosques and killing Catholics in a church in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
The letter wasn’t drafted by Osama bin Laden himself, but by a top Al-Qaeda official, according to the report.
In February, Al-Qaeda insisted in an online statement that the ISIS was “not a branch of Al-Qaeda.”
The Islamic State has recently become an influential group in Iraq, seizing control of an area larger than the UK, and the population under their hold is six million people practicing an extreme version of Islam, according to the Daily Mail.
On Monday, the group took hold of a town Jalawla, located 115 kilometers from the capital Baghdad, as well as two villages nearby. 20,000 people also remain trapped by the militants in the mountainous town of Sinjar, and need “life-saving assistance”, the UN said on Tuesday.
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The IS leader, a Sunni Muslim, is commander for over 10,000
militants, with reports of foreign extreme Islamists joining the
group. The fighters use Twitter, Facebook and other social media
to upload chilling footage of their deadly crimes.
The group’s funds are estimated at around $2 billion due to their
control of oil fields, support of wealthy Sunnis, as well as
theft of valuable antiquities, media said.
Also, the group allegedly is in possession of cutting-edge weaponry, especially during the latest offensive, when Iraqi troops fled, reportedly abandoning the artillery and armored vehicles provided by the US.
On the current situation of the Iraqi army, Ali Khedery, a former American official who advised US generals in Iraq, told the Daily Mail that “they are literally outgunned by an IS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of US military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army, which abandoned it.”