![]() ![]() “Arguably, truly lone attackers are so uncommon as to be anomalies, rather than the basis for a distinct typology of terrorism”, the authors contend. The individual who carries out the terrorist attack is the tip of the iceberg-the smallest and in many ways most insignificant part of the threat picture. explained a half-decade ago, this is not just the case with ISIS: almost all lone-actor terrorism results from broader networks and ecosystems that cultivate and assist in such attacks. Only a small minority of ISIS’s attacks could be categorized as “lone wolf” attacks, and even that number is probably inflated: we simply lack information about how a number of these attacks were actually conducted if we had the full facts, many would likely be shown to have a connections to ISIS.Īs Schuurman et al. The reality was that ISIS had evolved a sophisticated system for directing lone actors in Western countries through the foreign branch of its intelligence system, known as Amn al-Kharji. The latter designation-“inspired”-was, in itself, an indicator that these operatives were not truly “lone” actors. Especially during the height of ISIS’s global attacks campaign from 2014-17, a lot of media coverage was given to “lone wolf” attacks, or, as they were often called, “ISIS-inspired” attacks. The analytical hesitancy in recognising the reality of ISIS in the Congo and Mozambique is part of a continuum with how the analytical community has handled the question of ISIS “lone wolves”. There was also other publicly available evidence from sanctions notifications of financial streams from ISIS “Central” to “ADF”-and the same was true of Mozambique, where analysts similarly showed a strange reluctance for a time to accept that ISIS had arrived. The model of ISIS refashioning a local group into a wilayat under centralised administration followed the exact model of the earlier ones, beginning with “ADF” media coming under the control of ISIS “Central”. Given this knowledge built up over the last decade, it is bizarre that it took so long for analysts to accept that when the “Allied Democratic Forces” (ADF) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared allegiance to ISIS, it really became an ISIS province this was not just a branding exercise. The end result was, as a recent report for EER documented, that ISIS spread out across the world, while remaining “a monolithic, entirely centralized, supranational organization it does not have franchises, affiliates, or allies, only provinces of a supranational Empire, and its leadership controls all personnel, funding, and decision-making in every province”. ISIS “Central” dispatched very senior operatives to the wilayats to carry out a step-by-step process, beginning with the local groups’ media infrastructure, that brought them under centralized control. The difference is that where Al-Qaeda’s structure was designed to provide resources and common strategic guidance from Al-Qaeda Central (AQC) to the affiliates, while giving them broad autonomy to pursue their jihadist aims in a local context, ISIS’s wilayat model was the reverse: it was designed to bring the local jihadists into a highly centralised structure. What happened in Libya is key to understanding ISIS’s conception of its wilayats. Since then, affiliates have been formed in West Africa, known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Yemen, known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and in Somalia, called Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen (HSM).Īfter ISIS was expelled from Al-Qaeda in February 2014, it began creating wilayats (provinces), often by annexing former Al-Qaeda groups, as was the case with ABM, though not always: in Libya, ISIS imported the wilayat wholesale, bringing in thousands of fighters from outside and creating in effect a colony on the North African coast. The first one was ISIS, ironically, known at the time as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). ABM was thereafter known as Wilayat Sinai.Īl-Qaeda had begun forming “affiliates” in the early 2000s. ISIS officially arrived in Egypt in November 2014, when the Al-Qaeda group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM), defected to ISIS, five months after the declaration of the “caliphate” covering areas of Iraq and Syria. This is not the first time recently that ISIS has attacked Ismailia-there was another attack a month before this last one-and, over the past year, ISIS has been escalating its operations in the Sinai and other areas of Egypt, part of a broader trend of increased ISIS activity in Africa. This is a reminder that, despite the loss of its “caliphate” in 2019, ISIS remains dangerous across the world and raises again the issue of “lone wolves”. The attack was claimed the next day via ISIS’s Amaq News Agency. ![]() The Islamic State (ISIS) attacked a police checkpoint in the city of Ismailia, Egypt, on 30 December, killing four people, three of them policemen, and injuring twelve people.
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