This serves the symbolic purpose of demonstrating commitment to the cause, with the civilian man “reborn” into a second life as a militant leader. It also confuses Western media and helps to preserve the political viability of extremist leaders who adopt conventional political roles.
The paramount current example of this is Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim president of Syria. Sharaa was known for many years by his alias “Abu Mohammad al-Jolani,” under which name he became a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda and was tangentially involved in the creation of the Islamic State.
Sharaa was born in 1982 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but his family comes from the Golan Heights in Syria – an origin alluded to in his choice of “al-Jolani” as an alias. His family was reportedly displaced from the Golan Heights by Israeli occupation after the Six-Day War in 1967 and his father went from owning an olive grove in rural Syria to working as an oil industry economist in Saudi Arabia.
The alias of “Abu Mohammad al-Jolani” helped Sharaa stress his familial ties to Syria and his connection to the Palestinian cause when he traveled to Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion, joined al-Qaeda, and became the leader of a terrorist cell. He was captured by U.S. forces in 2005, and by his own account spent much of his captivity rededicating himself to overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
This focus on Assad led Sharaa to grow more estranged from al-Qaeda’s agenda. He founded a branch of al-Qaeda called the Nusra Front in Syria, but later renamed it Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and broke with his old terrorist masters.
When he finally achieved his goal of knocking Assad off his throne in December 2024, Sharaa dropped the Jolani alias for good, traded his combat fatigues for a three-piece suit, and reinvented himself as a statesman. The U.S. government sportingly decided to drop the $10 million bounty it had placed on the head of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and embraced the interim president named Ahmed al-Sharaa.
The al-Qaeda official who dispatched Jolani/Sharaa to Syria to create the Nusra Front was named Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, but he was better known by a pseudonym of his own: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a name hinting at his family’s history in Iraq. Under that name, he founded the Islamic State and became the most wanted man in the world.
Baghdadi was a fierce Islamist from an early age who later embraced the harsh fundamentalist doctrine of Salafism. Like Sharaa, he organized terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and he became the spiritual leader of the cell he co-founded. He was captured in the hard-fought city of Falluja and incarcerated at Camp Bucca, the same prison that held Sharaa.
Baghdadi was a fairly cooperative model prisoner, which led U.S. intelligence to underestimate the threat he posed. His terrorist cell was folded into al-Qaeda’s organization into Iraq, known as AQI, and when AQI’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was liquidated by a U.S. airstrike in 2006, the first version of the Islamic State was born.
ISIS was originally led by a different Baghdadi but, after he was killed by a U.S. raid in 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over and transformed the group into the rapacious, savage, hyper-Islamic “caliphate” that conquered a hefty amount of territory in Iraq and Syria to build its “caliphate.” One of the useful features of a nom de guerre is that it helps terrorist leaders to sculpt their biographies, playing up details such as Baghdadi’s alleged descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammad – a necessary qualification to lead the Islamic “caliphate” he wanted to create.
Baghdadi became a reclusive, security-obsessed leader during the salad days of the Islamic State and, when he died an ignominious death at the hands of U.S. special forces operatives on the orders of President Donald Trump in 2019, his fading caliphate collapsed. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi brought a certain mystique to his leadership of the world’s worst terror state, but nobody remembers Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Baghdadi’s old boss from al-Qaeda in Iraq, used a pseudonym as well – his real name was Ahmad Fadil Nazal al-Khalayeh. He was born and raised in Jordan, racking up dozens of criminal charges for assault, robbery, and drug abuse while living the life of a petty thug. He reinvented himself as a jihadi in 1989, at a training camp in Afghanistan established by Osama bin Laden.
The name “Zarqawi” alludes to Zarqa, the impoverished mining town in Jordan where the future terrorist mastermind grew up. More than most of his peers, he felt the need to create a new identity for himself and build a jihadist mythology, becoming an elusive figure of legend instead of a violent punk from a ramshackle town.
Zarqawi initially tried to wage jihad against the government of his native Jordan, but that did not go terribly well, so he became a rootless fire-breathing ideologue and an early pioneer of using the Internet to spread his teachings. This put him on al-Qaeda’s leadership radar, although bin Laden supposedly found him boorish and unreliable.
After a few years of working with the Afghan Taliban against U.S. forces, and a somewhat awkward interlude where he unilaterally declared himself to be in charge of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi finally received bin Laden’s seal of approval in 2004.
The actual man behind the myth always seemed to be unpopular with other al-Qaeda leaders, but Zarqawi’s preaching brought in recruits, his camps were very effective at training them, and he was an aggressive terror operative. He was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in June 2006, and by the time of his death, he had arguably become too extreme for al-Qaeda. His carefully constructed identity remains one of the great enigmas of Islamic terrorism – a legend filled with countless stories that no one can absolutely confirm or deny.
Al-Qaeda leaders usually employ pseudonyms, although there are prominent exceptions, like the group’s infamous founder Osama bin Laden. The current de facto leader of the organization is believed to be an Egyptian named Mohamed Salah al-Din al-Halim Zaidan, better known by his alias Saif al-Adel, and possibly the last surviving al-Qaeda leader from the pre-9/11 era. He took over from Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who used his real name and was killed by a U.S. drone strike in July 2022.
Terrorists like to use pseudonyms for one more, very simple reason: the Middle East is a confusing place, most of its countries are not noted for having well-organized high-tech bureaucracies, and using an invented name can be surprisingly effective at confusing law enforcement.
The background of Saif al-Adel is surprisingly murky, given that he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian special forces. Separating the true details of his biography from the stories told about him is challenging, and he has been shrewd about playing up that ambiguity. It is likely that the next generation of terrorists will learn many techniques from their forerunners about creating artificial identities in the Information Age.
Breitbart News
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