Sri Lanka attacks show ISIL’s shift
Bombings believed to have been carried out by a local cell
A bearded man wearing a heavy backpack and sandals walks deliberately across the courtyard of St. Sebastian’s Church in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. Moments later, he slips past the pews where women are sitting with their hair covered in veils of white lace, then detonates a bomb. The explosion that followed — one of numerous blasts unleashed by eight suicide bombers at six sites in three cities — was strong enough to blow the tiles off the church roof.
Between 250 and 260 people died in the co-ordinated attacks, which were believed to have been carried out by a local cell that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. That would make it one of the deadliest attacks carried out by the group, nearly three times as lethal as the 2015 Paris attacks and second only to the 2016 bombing of the Karrada market in Baghdad that killed 382 people.
Just four weeks after the ISIL caliphate was erased in Iraq and Syria — and four months after President Donald Trump first claimed the group was defeated — the terrorist group has reminded the world in dramatic fashion that it does not need to control territory to be a major threat.
“ISIS is not in disarray; it’s not ‘defeated,’” Laith Alkhouri, a senior director at Flashpoint, which assesses the global terrorist threat, said in a Twitter post on Wednesday. “It’s not a membership-based organization. It’s skilled at reorganizing and modifying its strategy to fit the evolving security landscape around the world.”
Experts say the group has simply pivoted to exploit the resources at hand and the notoriety it has banked as a global brand. With its command-andcontrol hierarchy in Syria and Iraq seriously degraded, it has become more decentralized, turning to its affiliates further afield to spread its message and mayhem.
“As its core weakens, its peripheries will become more dangerous,” Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, tweeted on Thursday.
The ISIL has always seen the caliphate as a global project, and despite the loss of territory in Iraq and Syria, has continued to expand abroad. When the remnants of al-Qaida were driven from Afghanistan in 2002, the group was also forced to become more decentralized, turning to foreign franchises in places like
Yemen, Iraq and northern Africa to regenerate. But unlike alQaida then, the ISIL already has numerous affiliates around the globe, an influential media ministry and thousands of fighters still underground in the group’s home base in Iraq and Syria.
As early as 2015, ISIL began instructing recruits to migrate to territory held by its overseas affiliates. And in a development sometimes missed by local officials abroad, it began signing up kindred local groups in distant outposts.
“Rather than building up membership from scratch, the group poaches members from existing hardliner groups, or oftentimes the entire groups themselves,” wrote Rita Katz, a co-founder of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.
“When combined with ISIS’ technical know-how and expertise, the combination with the local knowledge of more parochial groups can have devastating
effects,” said Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues.
And now that it has lost its safe haven in the Middle East, the Islamic State may be increasingly relying there on the model it perfected abroad.
The group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has gone underground and is believed to communicate only by personal courier, but its fighters communicate freely by encrypted apps.
Despite the declarations of victory, the Islamic State’s insurgent campaign is steadily gaining momentum across Iraq and Syria, according to a new report by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. The report found that ISIS was ramping up attacks in parts of northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan as well as in major cities that were once under its control, including Raqqa, Syria — its former capital — and Mosul and Fallujah, Iraq.