‘Osama warned against declaring an Islamic State too soon’

Osama bin Laden warned Al Qaeda affiliates against prematurely declaring an Islamic caliphate and cautioned his fighters against excessive display of brutality, according to newly declassified files seized from his Abbottabad hideout.

In letters to subordinates, Osama denounced almost every aspect of the Islamic State playbook but the admonishments were issued several years before Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq severed ties and rebranded itself as the ISIS.

But the documents released on Tuesday show the extent to which the ideological dispute behind that rupture was becoming intractable even before the slain Al Qaeda leader’s demise.

In one undated letter to Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who led the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen before he was killed in a US drone strike, Osama warned against taking over the capital city to quickly establish a new Islamic caliphate.

“We want Sana’a to establish an Islamic State, but first, we want to make sure that we have the capability to gain control of it,” Osama wrote. “The enemy continues to possess the ability to topple any state we establish. We have to remember that the enemy toppled the Taliban and Saddam’s regime,” he said.

Defeating the US was Osama’s first priority, and he consistently pushed back against Al Qaeda members who called for hitting local targets instead.

In the letter, Osama instructed al-Wuhayshi to remind “the new generation” not to pursue “separate operations rather than concentrating on the main objective.”

Osama, in the letters, warned against seizing more territory than would be possible to hold, against prematurely declaring the restoration of the Islamic “caliphate” and even against “publishing pictures of prisoners after they were beheaded”.

A senior US intelligence official involved in reviewing the Osama letters said that Osama was essentially warning subordinates that if they pursued the Islamic State model, “it will fail”.