Posted by John Rosenthal

Earlier this month, the French daily Libération published an interview with Sheikh Louay al-Zouabi, a self-avowed Salafist imam from Daraa, Syria, who claims to have issued a fatwa that sparked the uprising against the rule of Bashar al-Assad.

A radical fundamentalist current in Islam, Salafism advocates the emulation of the Salaf: the earliest generations of Muhammad’s companions and followers. It is the same form of Islam as that embraced by al-Qaeda, to whose ideas al-Zouabi has elsewhere unabashedly said he adheres. “I am al-Qaeda,” al-Zouabi has said.

For the details, see my new report on the website of the Stonegate Institute here.