MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

The healing is well under way …

Revelation 13:2b-4, “And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority. One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth [“gē” (G1093) – land enclosed within fixed boundaries; territory; region] marveled as they followed the beast. And they worshiped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, ‘Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?'”

By Loveday Morris, Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, The Independent – “Shortly before its operatives killed 14 Iraqi Shia children in a school bombing this month, the group once known as al-Qa’ida in Iraq sent guerrillas into northern Syrian villages with orders to reopen local Sunni classrooms. In a series of early-autumn visits, the militants handed out religious textbooks and backpacks bearing the group’s new name: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

A four-hour drive to the east, a rival al-Qa’ida faction, Jabhat al-Nusra, was busy setting up a jobs programme in Ash-Shaddadi, a desert town it has held since February. The Islamists restarted production in an oilfield that had been closed by the fighting, and fired up the town’s gas plant, now a source of income for the town.

The two rebel groups, with their distinct lineages to the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden, have concentrated Western fears of rising jihadist influences within Syria’s rebel movement. Two-and-a-half years after the start of the country’s uprising, Islamists are carving out fiefdoms and showing signs of digging in.

‘We all have the same aqidah [Islamic creed] as al-Nusra or the Islamic State,’ said a 23-year-old Jordanian Palestinian who gave the name Abu Abdallah in an interview in Jordan and who fights for a rebel brigade allied with the Islamists. ‘The aim is to free the Muslim lands and have the Islamic flag there.’

The prominence of the two groups — as fighters, as recruiters and, more recently, as local administrators — appears to have accelerated even as the Obama administration seeks to bolster moderate and secularist rebels with new weapons and training. Multiple independent studies, as well as Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials, show the hard-line Islamists surging ahead by almost every measure, undermining Western efforts to find a democratic alternative to President Assad…

The formal titles adopted by both al-Qa’ida groups include the Arabic term for greater Syria — al-Sham — that radical Islamists use to link their movement to the ancient Islamic caliphate that ruled a vast swath of the Middle East, with Damascus as its capital. Its use, the jihadists say, evokes an image of a future Middle East with a single Islamic state, encompassing the territories of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Israel.

It is the groups’ appeal to a greater jihad that explains why foreign volunteers continue streaming into Syria in numbers that surpass those seen during earlier conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq, said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a Middle East adviser to four US administrations. ‘Syria has become the most important destination for aspiring jihadists ever …'” Read more.

Flashback: Muslim Brotherhood Spiritual Leader Calls For Global Jihad In Syria – “Yusef al-Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar and has been a leading voice supporting the Arab Spring, warned that Iranian Shia were trying to ‘eat’ Sunni Muslims, who are a majority in the Muslim world… He said Sunni Muslims around the world should not wait for the West to help the rebel cause against the ‘Nusayris’, the Iranians and ‘the party of God’ [Hezbollah]. ‘They are the party of Satan, the party of the tyrant,’ he said. ‘The party of God does not kill [Sunni] Muslims, and these people draw close to God by killing [Sunni] Muslims.’” Read more.

Flashback: Israeli Home Front Defense Minister: Muslim Brotherhood Rising Up To Create Islamic Caliphate Across The Middle East – “Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter on Sunday warned that the Muslim Brotherhood is co-opting the Arab Spring with the end-goal of creating an Islamic ‘caliphate’ that would span the Middle East. ‘What started in Tunis and continued in Egypt is ongoing in Syria, and will threaten Jordan and other Arab countries,’ Dichter said. ‘The Brotherhood already has an outpost in the Palestinian territories, in the form of Hamas.’” Read more.