Recently, the Daily Wire revealed that an internal newsletter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence featured an article arguing for "changing terminology related to counterterrorism," because "certain phrases to identify international terrorism... are hurtful to Muslim-Americans." One of the supposedly "problematic phrases" is the term "jihadist." An alternative suggestion given in the newsletter to denote jihadists is the word khawarij.[1]

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This year, 5 April was the world "al-Quds Day" ("Jerusalem Day"): an event organised by Iran in the name of supporting the Palestinian cause. Armed factions across the region that are backed by Iran are known to put on displays and events for al-Quds Day. This includes groups within the Local Defence Forces network (LDF) in Syria. The Aleppo region is arguably the epicentre of the LDF and al-Quds Day activity was well in evidence there. Below are some observations on the event in the Aleppo area this year.

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The Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), an Uyghur Islamic group that has a Central Asia-based central leadership as well as a Syria branch, has issued a new statement addressed to the people of East Turkestan (the Xinjiang region in western China where the Uyghurs live). The statement denounces some Uyghur oppositionists who have recently accused the TIP of being linked to al-Qa'ida and serving the interest of the Chinese government. The TIP instead portrays itself as equivalent to the 'armed forces' of the Uyghur people, striving for the liberation of East Turkestan through the only viable means: namely, armed force.

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The insurgent faction Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, which dominates the areas of northwest Syria outside of Syrian government control, has presently been rocked by the assassination of Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, an Iraq-born leader of the organisation who had been detained by the group's security apparatus on various charges, including 'collaboration' with the Americans, but was subsequently released last month on the basis that the allegations against him were not proven.

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Recently, Israel has carried out airstrikes on a wide-scale across Syrian government territory, hitting targets of both Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah. The most prominent of these strikes came yesterday with the hit on the area of the Iranian consulate in Damascus. This strike most notably killed General Muhammad Reza Zahedi (al-Hajj Abu Mahdi), who has been described as the head of the IRGC's Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon. In the Syrian context, this meant that he served as the overall IRGC head of the Local Defence Forces (LDF) network. This network, also known as the 'Forces of the Friends' (Quwat al-Asdiqa') is the project of Syrian groups backed and commanded by IRGC and Hezbollah personnel in coordination with the Syrian military.

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