HISTORICAL
This group formed in January 2012 during the Syrian Civil War.
The United Nations, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Turkey have designated the Al-Nusra Front as a terrorist organization.
The Al-Nusra Front is a group comprised of Syrians who were part of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Islamist network fighting the American forces in Iraq. These Syrians remained in Iraq after the withdrawal of American forces, but upon the outbreak of Syrian civil war in 2011, the Islamic State of Iraq sent the Syrian mujahideen (one engaged in Holy War or Jihad) into Syria. The Front claimed credit for suicide attacks in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
Since April of 2013 they have split from the Islamic State of Iraq yet consider they to be a subset group of Al-Quada.
SOCIAL
The structure of the group varies across Syria. In Damascus the group operates an underground cell system. In Aleppo, the group is organized as a military with units divided into brigades, regiments, and platoons. All potential recruits must undertake a 10-day religious-training course, followed by a 15-to-20-day military-training program.
An increasing number of Americans have been attempting to join the fighting in Syria. As of November 2013, there had also been three publicly disclosed cases of Americans fighting in Syria linked to al-Nusra.
The group has taken part in military operations with the Free Syrian Army. Abu Haidar, a Syrian FSA coordinator said that al-Nusra Front “have experienced fighters who are like the revolution’s elite commando troops.”
As of July 2013, al-Nusra controls Ash-Shaddadeh, a town of roughly 16,000.
ECONOMIC
Like ISIS, al-Nusra governs much of the territory it holds. It establishes Islamic courts, although it does not typically carry out executions, as ISIS has been known to do. The security it provides, along with basic services like electricity and food distribution, have earned them respect from the local population, and in some cases have fostered dependency. The organization also issues propaganda videos aimed at ordinary Muslims from its media group, al-Manara al-Baida, or The White Minaret.
Portions of the local Syrian population are supporters of al-Nusra, and many Syrian citizens protested when the U.S. designated the group as a terrorist organization.
POLITICAL
Al-Nusra contains a hierarchy of religious bodies, with a consulting council making decisions for the group. Each region has a commander and a sheikh. The sheikh supervises the commander from a religious perspective.
On 28 August 2014, Al-Nusra militants kidnapped 45 UN peacekeepers from Fiji in the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone. The group demanded that it be removed from the UN’s list of terrorist organizations in exchange for the lives of the peacekeepers.
In October 2014, al-Nusra began attacking the Free Syrian Army and other moderate Islamist groups that it was formerly allied with, in a bid to establish its own Islamic state in the cities it controlled.
SOLUTIONS
Star Trek…. Seriously.
The Star Trek Franchise envisions a future of humanity without racism, poverty, disease and war. The series, in all its incarnations, has shown us the promise of a future yet to come.
Star Trek, in my humble opinion, can be deemed a barometer of our time. In the 1980’s the US was much more aware of international terrorism due to first-hand experience with Islamic extremist terrorism, including the 1979-80 Iran Hostage Crisis and the 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon. Star Trek created an opportunity to address this issue and it soon became a topic of numerous TNG episodes and the back-story to much of Deep Space Nine.
Here is a brief clip of Data and Captain Picard discussing terrorism:
Captain Kirk sums up a solution in the end of the Into Darkness movie after Khan ( a “savage” of our generation) has destroyed. While delivering the eulogy for those who have perished in the devastating attacks, he asks, “To what extent must we reshape our society to confront threats, real or imagined?”
His answer: “There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. Our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. But that’s not who we are. When Christopher Pike first gave me his ship, he had me recite the Captain’s Oath. (“Space, the final frontier…”) Words I didn’t appreciate at the time. But now I see them as a call for us to remember who we once were and who we must be again.”