The threat of the new “global offensive” of the “Islamic State”

Islamic State (IS) supporters are being urged to avenge the recent death of their leader by launching a new “global offensive” against Europe and Israel.

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In an announcement to coincide with Ramadan, the group’s new spokesman urged would-be jihadists to stage terrorist attacks while “the Crusaders fight each other” over the invasion of Ukraine.

In an audio message shared and heard online The timesAbu-Omar al-Muhajir said non-Muslim nations were “preoccupied” with Russia’s invasion of the neighboring Eastern European nation – presenting an “opportunity” for ISIS to attack.

vendetta

The group’s spokesman, Muhajir, called for revenge for ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, who was killed in a US operation in Syria in February, and urged the jihadists to “fight them all”.

Qurayshi died along with members of his family and a deputy IS leader after detonating a suicide bomb as “special forces encircled his hideout” in northern Syria BBC reported. Joe Biden said that Qurayshi’s death “eliminated a major terrorist threat to the world.”

In a message to ISIS supporters circulated via messaging app Telegram, Muhajir said: “We are announcing, trusting in God, a blessed campaign to exact revenge.”

Strike back and “Allah will answer and punish them at your hand,” he continued, adding, “Your opportunity has come.”

In what The Times described as echoing “past ISIS statements,” Muhajir said Jerusalem could only be liberated through the return of ISIS’ “caliphate.” Jihadists should “arm themselves and carry out more attacks” on Israel and other enemies of the group, he said.

New offensive

The address was followed by a series of IS-Linked Attacks in Israel in recent weeks. Footage shared on social media of an attack in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv, in which a Palestinian gunman killed five people last month, showed the terrorist shooting at people running for cover and the driver of a passing man cars shot .

IS also took responsibility for a bomb attack on a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, in early March. More than 60 people were killed after a man detonated an explosive vest containing about 150 ball bearings and 5kg of explosives.

Then comes the call for more attacks so-called IS-Beatle El Shafee Elsheikh was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of four Americans in Syria in 2012 and 2013. His trial made clear that the “ISIS threat persists in Syria and Afghanistan,” where Kurdish fighters “hold precarious control over camps in Syria with thousands of captured ISIS fighters and their families,” it said The Wall Street Journal.

The West is currently focused on “the threats from China and Russia, but the jihadists are still trying to kill Americans and attack the homeland if they get the chance,” the newspaper continued. The only way to “prevent further attacks” is to remain “vigilant.”

Europe in particular has “gone blind to the next jihad threat,” said London-based counterterrorism expert Liam Duffy. “It’s been a while since Isis launched a major attack on the West,” he wrote in an article about unherd in January, but “that doesn’t mean there aren’t still people who kill in the name of jihad.”

“After America withdrew from the region, there was much talk about the danger Afghanistan is once again becoming a haven for terrorists threaten the West,” added Duffy. And “Such concerns are certainly justified“.

But the Times Middle East correspondent Richard Spencer argued that Muhajir’s call for a new “global offensive” now feels “more like a sign of weakness.”.

“There was a time when a message from Isis warning of imminent attacks on Western targets would have caused consternation, at least in Whitehall and Washington,” he said. But the “latest news calls for an appropriate response: vigilance, but in proportion”.

The fact that “more Russians and Ukrainians died in six weeks of fighting in Central Europe than all the casualties of British and American troops in two decades of war in the Middle East” put “the dangers of radical Islamism for the West into perspective”.

Islamic extremists have been successful in “spreading chaos” in the Middle East, Spencer acknowledged. But unlike a nuclear-armed Vladimir Putinthey don’t really threaten “the end of the world”.

https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/middle-east/956468/what-should-west-expect-islamic-state-global-offensive The threat of the new “global offensive” of the “Islamic State”