The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory
Brian Fishman

November 3, 2016

In early 2005 al-Qaeda's security chief, Sayf al-Adl, described a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world, including calling for the resurrection of the Caliphate in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2016. This was to be followed by a campaign of global violence that would teach the world "the meaning of real terrorism" and would culminate in a jihadi "Final Victory" in 2020. Drawing on revolutionary declassified data from inside al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory describes the Islamic State's development over the life of al-Adl's plan. Using sources that jihadis hoped would never be public, The Master Plan looks inside the battles among jihadis that allowed the Islamic State, with its particularly bloody vision of jihad, to seize control of the global jihadi movement from al-Qaeda. From al-Qaeda's battles with other jihadis before 9/11 that empowered the Godfather of the Islamic State all the way through al-Qaeda's failed effort to strong-arm its would-be ally in Iraq and the Islamic State's strategy to outlast the Awakening and Surge in Iraq, The Master Plan tells the inside story on how the Islamic State metastasized into a global threat.

Brian Fishman is a Counterterrorism Research Fellow with the International Studies Program at New America and is the author of The Master Plan: ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory. He has been studying the progenitors of ISIS since 2005, and served as the Director of Research at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. In 2008, Fishman first taught an academic course on the Islamic State of Iraq’s turn toward governance, and he predicted the rise of the Islamic State in early 2011, prior to the Syrian civil war.

Presentation available soon.