Terror on Three Continents
http://www.wsj.com/articles/terror-on-three-continents-1435356187
ISIS and other jihadis show their global reach on a single day.
Jihadists have a fondness for anniversaries, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by three terror attacks, on three continents, all taking place on the eve of the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate last June 29. That makes the prospect of follow-on strikes through Monday that much more plausible—and more difficult to stop.
ISIS took credit for only one of the three atrocities—a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait, in which at least 27 people were killed. But their near-simultaneity suggested some kind of coordination, or at least joint inspiration. Ramadan began last week, and an ISIS spokesman recently called on “mujahadeen everywhere” to make it “a month of disasters for the infidels.”
Coordinated or not, ISIS’s trademark hyper-brutality has made its mark on jihadi minds. In Tunisia a gunman posing as a tourist killed at least 37 people, many of them European vacationers, at a beach resort. In France terrorists were less successful but no less bloody-minded: A car-bombing attempt at an American-owned chemical plant near Lyon failed to cause major damage, but not before the alleged attacker, Yassine Salhi, planted the decapitated head of his boss on the plant’s gate, along with an Islamic flag.
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All of this is a stark reminder that the Middle East is no Las Vegas: What happens there doesn’t stay there. Tunisians make up the largest contingent of foreign fighters in ISIS, which took credit for murdering 21 people at a Tunis museum in March. Thousands of Europeans, and an estimated 180 Americans, have gone to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and Western security officials will not be able to track all of them. That increases the possibility of mass-casualty attacks by well-trained killers, as opposed to the more inept recent attempts by lone-wolf jihadists in Texas and Massachusetts.
Friday’s attacks should cause some rethinking from so-called civil libertarians in Congress and the White House, who have competed to hobble and dismantle the National Security Agency’s antiterror surveillance capabilities.
It’s especially instructive to note that Mr. Salhi had once been under surveillance by French intelligence but was dropped several years ago, likely because French resources are stretched by the number of potential suspects. A similar story played out in January, when it turned out that French authorities had stopped surveilling Said and Cheríf Kouachi nearly a year before their attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
The larger lesson is that defensive measures alone will never suffice to stop the next terrorist outrage; the best defense is a devastating offense. President Obama recently deployed 450 additional trainers to help the Iraqi army fight ISIS, as if Islamic State is mostly Baghdad’s problem. But ISIS is a direct threat to the West as well as to the region, and it needs to be dealt with that way. Until our mindset changes, we can expect more terror, on more continents.
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