While Islamic State (IS) formally claimed responsibility for only one of the deadly terror attacks that have struck Paris, Nice, and Vienna in recent weeks, Shiraz Maher sees its influence manifest in all of them. And even if Europe is no stranger to the group’s depredations, Maher detects a troubling pattern in the current spate:
There is a common thread that links them all: the new and dangerously innovative ways IS now identifies its targets. From its earliest days, around 2014-15, the group advised members to select targets that would cause maximum offense and outrage. Within Syria and Iraq, for example, the group regularly desecrated churches and other religious and cultural heritage sites, such as the ancient city of Palmyra.
All of this informs its broader strategic view—that there is a cosmic battle between Islam and everyone else; between “truth” and “falsehood.” The group’s own literature, including a ten-page editorial in its online magazine Dabiq in 2015, has described the need to “destroy” what it calls the “gray zone,” [which poses] an existential threat to [IS’s] extremist dogma that preaches a Manichaean world of dark and light, good and bad, Muslim and infidel.
Attacks such as those we have seen in France and Austria are designed to eradicate the gray zone. Their aim is to polarize populations, undermine any sense of the common good, and hasten a civilizational crisis.
Groups such as IS are, for now, beaten and in retreat. Their territorial control in the Middle East and ability to command support on the ground in foreign capitals is severely degraded. But what endures is the power of their ideas to entice young, disaffected Muslim men, and the terrible chaos that ensues from that.
Read more on New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2020/11/how-terror-returned-streets-europe