WASHINGTON - Frequent attacks carried out in Western countries over the last few days are raising new fears about the capability of the extremists who call themselves the Islamic State which controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria.
“There is no evidence that any of the episodes was carried out by any centrally organised terror network,” The New York Times said in a report. “But in each case the violence was plotted or executed by the individuals moved by the messages of Islamist extremists and all took place in one month since the Islamic State began exhorting Muslims in the West to commit such acts.”
The report took note of the arrest by British police of four men accused of plotting a bombing on the scale of the Mumbai hotel attack six years ago, the Australian authorities of a ring of 12 accused of plotting murders, including a public beheading, a gunman’s attack on Canadian Parliament building in Ottawa and killing a soldier guarding a war memorial, a day before a motorist who overran two soldiers, killing one. In addition, in New York City, a man wielding a hatchet attacked four police officers in Queens.
“The series of episodes over just the last four weeks is raising new fears about the capacity of the extremists who call themselves the Islamic State to catalyze so-called lone-wolf attacks, conceived and carried out by individuals or small groups around the Western world who may have little or no connection to the Islamic State," the Times said.
“The Al Qaeda ‘fan boys’ never did this, definitely not in so coordinated a fashion in so close a time,” said William McCants, a scholar of Islamist militancy at the Brookings Institution.
Decades of Qaeda calls for Muslims in the West to instigate their own attacks mostly “fell on deaf ears,” but “the ISIS guys are just really energized,” McCants said, using an alternate name for the group, the Islamic State.
Analysts say the far-flung plots and attacks mark a change in the nature of the group and its threat to the West. Unlike Al-Qaeda or other jihadist groups, the Islamic State had previously focused on capturing territory across Syria and Iraq and on sectarian killings in its own region — not on a global war against the West. But since the American-led bombing campaign against the group began to hit its Syrian stronghold, the Islamic State has sought to retaliate by urging its sympathisers throughout the West to strike back on its behalf, according to the Times.
The group’s social media messages to Muslims living in the West have changed sharply, from “come join the attack” to “we are being attacked and what are you doing? You are just sitting there!” said Mokhtar Awad, a researcher at the liberal Center for American Progress, based in Washington.
“They are trying to shame sympathisers,” he said on a visit to Cairo. “If you can’t join us over here, at least do what you can over there.””
Now, the swift responses in Canada and elsewhere suggest that its unique combination of spectacular violence, media-savvy messaging and sheer braggadocio may enable the Islamic State to bring about lone-wolf attacks like the assault on the Canadian Parliament even without building an international network or organisation, the report said. “If it inspires more, they would pose a diffuse and pervasive threat that Al-Qaeda could only dream of.”
The Canadian attacks have already cast a different light on the proliferation of measures by countries around the world to stop their citizens from traveling to Syria and Iraq to join the fight for fear that they might return to pose threats at home.
In some ways, the Islamic State is merely elaborating a “doctrine of defensive jihad and the privatisation of violence that Al-Qaeda has been advocating for nearly two decades,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University, who studies militant Islam. “There is nothing specific about the Islamic State that inspires acts of vigilante violence. These lone-wolf attacks were happening before,” Professor Haykel wrote in an email message, noting the case of Palestinian-American Major Nidal Malik Hassan’s massacre at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.