Anyone following insurgencies and terrorism for long enough ought, by now, have lots all sense of wonder and astonishment at just about anything and concluded that this is one mad world peopled by a lot of mad people. True so - and yet, sometimes something crazy enough to astonish the most seasoned pros - never mind COIN rookies like me - turns up. Such is the bizarre story of the Gaza Emirate.

On 14 September, 2009, the imam of the Rafah mosque Ibn Taymiyya, the ultra-hyper-super sheikh ‘Abd al-Latif Musa - known largely in this story by his AQ nom de guerre Abu al-Nur al-Maqdisi - declared an Islamic emirate in Gaza, denounced Hamas as a bunch of godless heathen softies and called upon everyone with the sort of backbone these guys find desirable (needless to say, we’re not talking Macaulay’s Horatius here) to go over under the “military command of Mosque Ibn Taymiyya”. Hamas, not being pleased about being called softies of all things, decided to go up to Ibn Taymiyya, and demand that it be handed over to Hamas’ ministry for religious affairs. This suspected interference with his clerical autonomy did not go well at all with al-Nur al-Maqdisi, and a bloodbath erupted, leaving 22 dead - including al-Nur al-Maqdisi himself and a high-level Hamas commander.

Now if this were any other shootout between branches of various Islamist movements, no-one would have greatly wondered. The Palestinian insurgency is no exception from the rule that most insurgent movements are loosely grouped around a main effort, but diverse and dissenting in just about everything else. The consequence is that sub-sectarian bloodshed is as much a fact of life in an insurgency as sunrise and sunset. Except, this one was different.

In the micro-scale, this was a run-of-the-mill provincial power struggle about a cleric challenging Hamas, which sees itself as being on the way to a semblance of political legitimacy on the pattern of Sinn Fein by a cooperation of sorts with the Israeli political establishment. On the other hand, the reality is that this was merely one run of a large-scale conflict set to emerge in the near future, between ultra-radical Salafist Jihadism - the form supported by al-Quaeda - and radical islamists that see themselves as being in the ideological lineage of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Quaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood haven’t had much love for each other since an early split. AQ regards the Muslim Brotherhood as essentially a bunch of softies, while the Muslim Brotherhood - itself no walk in the park - is getting tired of paying the bill for al-Quaeda’s militantism. The Ibn Taymiyya shootout was, effectively, Hamas trying to shoot down the Emirate idea in the Gaza strip.

Hamas, for all its derangement, sees the Palestinian/Israeli political process as effectively a set of institutions it needs to go through to succeed. Al-Quaeda, on the other hand, does not see any state as legitimate, and refuses to go through the institutions. Setting up the Islamic Emirate was not merely an act of intentionally peeking off Hamas - they could have done that by shooting a few of their militants. Rather, it was a demonstration of the al-Quaeda way to run things - opposition instead of collaboration, an all-or-nothing, black-and-white image of the jihadist struggle. It is crucial that al-Quaeda did not compete with Hamas as a militant force, it competed with Hamas as a state-building and administrative body. It was a symbol precious enough for al-Quaeda to send a ranking cleric there who had the survival chances of a three-legged hedgehog on a six-lane motorway.

So what’s the lesson here? The lesson is twofold. First, Jihadism isn’t as united as it feels like at time. This should not be a particularly surprising fact, given the number of ideological divides. Two main lines, however, emerge with reasonable clarity. Salafists despise all politics that isn’t about a Sharia-ruled Islamic emirate right there and then and have little tolerance for gradualism. Islamic socialists and various other Islamists who seek to interact with national or global power structures like Hamas does are complete anathema to them, and seen as just another face of the enemy.

What are the effects for counter-insurgency? The threat here is that counter-insurgencies will have to make the uncomfortable compromise of supporting ‘the lesser evil’. As the Operation Cyclone debacle shows, that’s not a good idea at all - while it worked, it did give rise to a lot of deranged psychos with Stingers that turned upon their previous supporters as soon as the Russians were kicked out of the country. In short, supplying Hamas to fight al-Quaeda is not only irresponsible and unsuitable, it is also demoralising for the allies who suffered at Hamas’ hand, esp. Israel, and would lead to a dissipation of all credibility. On the other hand, where protecting civilians is the prime objective, this will be an added piece of mess for already overtasked COIN forces. Finally, it shows that the political wing of Islamic radicalism has its enemies, and potent ones at that. Even once the conflict itself is resolved, the radical fringe cells will, as the example of the PIRA showed, keep on fighting the bad fight. COIN forces will need to prepare to be not merely protectors of themselves and the civilian population from insurgent attacks on them, but also to protect the civilians from being caught in the crossfire between opposing factions and deliver a viable third way alternative to radical and more radical.