Islamic State Kills Shi’ite Cleric in Damascus
ISIS — the Islamic State — is opposed not only to non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists), but also to those who profess a brand of Islam that ISIS deems illegitimate. For the fanatical Sunnis of ISIS, this means the Shi’a, whom many Sunnis, even those outside ISIS, regard as Infidels (kuffar).
These Sunnis describe Shi’a as “Rafidite dogs.” “Rafidi” means “rejectors”, and here the “rejectors” referred to are the Shi’a, who “rejected” the caliphates of Abu Bakr and Umar. Some Sunni groups, especially those whom Salafi or Wahhabi interpretations influence, and who rely on scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah, view Shia doctrines — such as the accusation that the Quran is incomplete, reverence for Imams, and cursing of the Companions (Sahaba) — as “vile and evil” acts of apostasy or polytheism.
The Sunni hatred of the Shi’a has led to wholesale killings of Shi’a believers. In Pakistan, for example, there is a Sunni group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, that attacks Shia mosques and madrasas, and kills Shi’a individuals. According to Stanford University’s “Mapping Militant Organizations,” as of February 2012, the “primary methods” of Sipah-e-Sahaba were targeted killings of prominent Shi’as – including political activists, doctors, businessmen, engineers, and intellectuals. The Shi’a have sometimes fought back, and assassinated some of the Sipah-e-Sahaba leaders, including Haq Nawaz Jhangvi in 1990, Isar ul-Qasmi in 1991, Zia ul-Rehman Farooqi in 1997, and Azam Tariq in 2003.
In Afghanistan, the Sunni fanatics of the Taliban have killed the Shi’a, bombing their mosques, killing them at checkpoints, and randomly selecting Shi’a for execution whenever the spirit moves them. The Taliban have repeatedly carried out massacres of the Hazara, an ethnic minority whose members are Shi’a. The Shia have been subject to at least ten mass killings. The worst of those massacres was carried out in August 1998 at Mazar-e Sharif, where the Taliban massacred an estimated 8,000 Hazara civilians. Many thousands more Shi’a Hazara died between 2002 and 2022, with both the Taliban and ISIS targeting unarmed civilians in mosques and schools. In addition, the Taliban have been systematically forcing Hazaras off their land and homes.
The ISIS killing of an important Shi’a cleric in Damascus on May 1 is just the latest example of Sunnis killing Shi’a religious figures, as they have done in the past in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on the cleric’s assassination can be found here: “ISIS claims responsibility for killing of Shiite imam in Damascus car bombing,” The New Region, May 8, 2026:
The Islamic State (ISIS) on Thursday claimed responsibility for the killing of Syrian Shiite imam Farhan Hassan al-Mansour in a bombing attack targeting his vehicle in the Damascus countryside last week.
In a statement published in its weekly al-Naba newspaper, the extremist group said its fighters detonated a sticky bomb placed inside Mansour’s car after he left the Sayyida Zeinab area south of the Syrian capital last Friday.
Other reports claim that Mansour died when a grenade was thrown into his car.
The group described Mansour as “one of the prominent imams of disbelief” and asserted that the blast “led to his death and the destruction of his vehicle.”
Syrian authorities had earlier announced the killing of Mansour, who served as the Friday preacher at the Sayyida Zeinab shrine in Rif Dimashq and was considered a notable figure within Syria’s Shiite community….
The Sayyida Zeinab shrine is the most important Shi’a site in Syria; as its imam, Mansour was considered to be the leading Shi’a cleric in Syria.
Ahmed Al-Sharaa now appears more willing to shed, like a snakeskin, his jihadist past. He is trying to prevent sectarian strife from tearing Syria apart, and that includes preventing harm from coming not just to the 300,000 Shi’a from ISIS, but also to the three million Alawites, for their sect is considered to belong to Shi’a Islam.
Iran’s foreign ministry later “strongly condemned” the attack, calling it an act of terrorism and saying attacks on religious sites and clerics in Syria were part of a “US-Israeli conspiracy to incite strife and division among the countries of the region.”
The various religious and ethnic sects in Syria — the Sunnis, Shi’a, and Alawites, the Druze and the Kurds — need no encouragement from either Israel and the United States to be at daggers drawn. Israel sees itself as the protector of the Druze and, to a lesser extent, of the Kurds, but has no interest in fomenting Sunni-Shi’a conflict.
It is ISIS that has been attacking the Shi’a in Iraq, in Pakistan, and Afghanistan, aided and abetted by such groups as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Sepah-e-Sahaba in Pakistan. It is ISIS that wants to bring chaos and confusion to those Muslim regimes that do not share its ideology — which means all of them. ISIS does not believe in Muslim nation-states, but rather, in a caliphate that would consist of former Muslim states now dissolved into that caliphate. And then, as European countries inexorably Islamize, that caliphate will expand as ever more countries through demography are conquered for Islam.