Ramadan 2016 is over now, and Islam’s holiest month saw a spate of mass killings all over the world, from Istanbul to Saudi Arabia to Bangladesh.
The fact that ISIS carried out so many killings in so many places during the Muslim holy month was likely symbolic, as terrorists are big on dates. And while the ISIS attacks could die down, they could well also ramp up, experts said.
That’s because the radicals are out to prove that they are down but not out. While they are slowly being pushed out of territory in Iraq and Syria, they are out to prove to the world, their followers, and many potential recruits that they are doing God’s mission.
“These ISIS bombings may diminish, but that is not certain. Although Ramadan is over, the shrinking Islamic State can be expected to continue focusing intensely on carrying out violent (attacks) outside its shrinking realm,” Wayne White, former deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Middle East Intelligence Office, told Borderless News Online.
The radicals are doing this to offset the mounting reality that they are taking a thrashing in their heartland, the place that was supposed to be the new Caliphate – or the center of a new Islamist empire spanning much of the Arab world. The empire would be based on the group’s violent worldview, and would see severe punishment for watching TV, listening to music or anything else the group views as unwholesome.
The attack in Medina, Saudi Arabia – which is filled with religious pilgrims from all over the Muslim world during Ramadan – “shows that a twisted ISIS knows no bounds in lashing out at ‘establishment’ Islam as well as its tormentors in the West.” White said.
Moreover, some of the Ramadan attacks were carried out not by ISIS proper but by wanna-be jihadists inspired by ISIS propaganda they read on the Internet, although it remains unknown the level of connection to ISIS. Those include the mass killing at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida last month that killed nearly 50 people. The recent attack in a Bangladesh Café was also allegedly the handiwork of a group of young people from well-to-do families who were influenced by online propaganda.
The Internet is hard to filter for such information, as there are around a billion websites on the Web, and authorities simply cannot watch every one of them, neither can they watch every Tweet and chat space in the cyber world.
Meanwhile, whether the recent spate of attacks – which killed many Muslims – will help or hurt ISIS is tricky.
Some experts said that while attacks in Muslim countries from Turkey to Saudi Arabia to Bangladesh will not help ISIS, they won’t hurt them that much either.
In Turkey’s case, the government has already has cracked down hard on extremist networks, will make it harder for recruits to slip through to ISIS, and may even engage in some limited hostilities against ISIS’s remaining holdings near the Turkish border, White said.
Saudi Arabia is more complex. Those drawn to ISIS’s credo – and many conservative Muslims as well – already dismiss the Saudi ruling elite as highly corrupt, far less Islamic in practice than desired, and too close to the U.S. and the West, White said.
Many Saudis and Sunni Muslims probably will applaud bombings against the Shi’a mosque in Qatif, in Saudi Arabia, as well as the Jeddah, Jordan bombing near the U.S. Consulate, White said.
“However, the bombing among pilgrims outside the Prophet’s Mosque in the holy city of Medina is another matter entirely,” White said.
“This is an outrage to the vast majority of all Muslims—an attack on the site of the Prophet’s tomb,” White said.
“Again, however, so many drawn to ISIS’s rabid ideology will remain unaffected,” White said.
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