By Pamela Engel

Most people know the world’s most barbaric terrorist group as
ISIS or the Islamic State.

Some world leaders have taken to calling
them “Daesh,” knowing the terror group hates the
name so much that its militant members have threatened
to “cut the tongue” out of anyone who used it. But some experts say there’s one moniker the terrorist group
hates even more than Daesh — and enemies of ISIS have been using
it to taunt the group.

Malcolm Nance, a terrorism expert and veteran
military-intelligence officer, made note of the name “Khawarij”
during a terrorism debate at the Comedy Cellar in New York City
last month. “They are the 7th century Islamic cult,” Nance explained in an
email to Business Insider. “[T]he reason they don’t like it is
because they are considered apostates in the Quran. The Prophet
Mohammed warned about them being false Muslims.”

Some Muslims — and even ISIS’ jihadi rivals — refer to ISIS
members as “Khawarij” or “Kharijites.” The leader of Al Qaeda,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, recently referred to the followers of ISIS
leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by the name, according to Thomas
Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies and an expert on terrorist groups.

Joscelyn explained: “It refers to an early breakaway faction of
Muslims considered extreme for branding other Muslims as
disbelievers because they supposedly weren’t pure enough in their
faith. Today, Al Qaeda and other jihadists use the term as a
synonym for ‘extremist,’ or other derogatory adjectives, to
describe members of the Islamic State.”

ISIS responds to this by arguing that Al Qaeda and other
jihadists not affiliated with ISIS “have fallen into a state of
nonbelief,” Joscelyn said.

“The implication is that the Islamic State isn’t similar to the
Kharijites because the groups leveling this criticism aren’t true
Muslims, so therefore they deserve to be branded as apostates,”
Joscelyn said in an email.

“That’s the Islamic State’s exclusionary argument. It is both a
source of strength for them, as members and new recruits can feel
like they are part of the only righteous Islamic entity on the
planet, and a weakness, as it makes it difficult for the Islamic
State to make tactical compromises with groups that are similar
in terms of ideology.”

But this exclusionary argument lends credence to the
branding of ISIS as Khawarij.

During ISIS’ earliest days, when it was Al Qaeda in Iraq, the
group gained a reputation for being especially brutal, so much so
that Zawahiri wrote letters to the group’s leadership warning
them to tone down the violence. Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group,
was known for targeting Shia Muslims in Iraq, something Al Qaeda
Central has shied away from.

And Baghdadi would even disavow other Sunni militant groups.
Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan quoted an Al Qaeda in Iraq
commander from Fallujah in their book
“ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror” who said that Baghdadi “was
always very consistent about his position on fellow Sunni
militant groups that were not part of his own organization.”

Baghdadi said fighting those groups was more of a priority than
fighting the Americans who invaded Iraq, according to the
commander.

Still, ISIS apparently doesn’t like to be compared to
the Kharijites who used similar tactics.

Analysts point to documents purporting to be from ISIS that argue
why the group shouldn’t be labeled as such. But it’s unclear
whether the central leadership itself has spoken out against the
use of the name.

“I’m not sure that being labeled Khawarij is the soft spot or the
vulnerable spot that many make it out to be,” Charlie
Winter, an expert on jihadist propaganda and associate fellow at
the International Centre for Counterterrorism at The Hague,
told Business Insider.

He continued: “I think if anything, they revel in being labeled
anything really. The more that these accusations are made against
them, the more vehement they are in denying them and, in a sense,
the more separated they become from mainstream Islam, the better.
They want to be seen as the group that’s returning to the very
earliest iteration of Islam.”

Winter cautioned against thinking that labels are effective
weapons against ISIS.

“When policymakers or analysts or military men wouldn’t stop
talking about the Kharijites or takfiris, using these
very controversial religious terms in a context they aren’t
necessarily comfortable with, that opens up a debate that the
people using those words will struggle a huge amount with,” he
said.

“It happened with [US Secretary of State] John Kerry when he was
calling the Islamic State takfiris. It opens up a part of the
discussion on the Islamic State that non-Muslims I don’t think
necessarily should try and get too heavily involved in because
it’s not necessarily appropriate for these incredibly loaded and
complicated, complex terms to be used potentially incorrectly.”