Islamic State’s Global Terrorism Apparatus is Back in Business

And Antisemitism in Europe is An Important Reason Why

German special police forces in Solingen, Germany, after the IS attack || 24 August 2024. THILO SCHMUELGEN / REUTERS

The Islamic State (IS) carried out its first attack in Germany since 2016 on Friday. The event sheds light on the state of the jihadist threat in Europe and more generally the progress IS has made since it formally announced the onset of a new phase of global terrorism in January.

THE SOLINGEN ATTACK

In Solingen, just east of Düsseldorf in western Germany, a three-day “Festival of Diversity” opened on 23 August to mark 650 years since the foundation of the city. The celebrations were disrupted in the evening by a stabbing attack, which murdered three people and wounded eight. The perpetrator escaped. After the usual period wherein authorities professed themselves unclear about why this had happened, the killer turned himself in yesterday, confessed his jihadist motives, and IS let it be known he was one of their agents.

It is an abiding myth that IS “claims anything”. This simply is not true. IS’s propaganda in general strives for accuracy for reasons of self-interest: the group’s whole pitch to the Muslim world is that it alone tells the masses the truth, and protecting that credibility is central to its model of revolutionary warfare.¹ IS’s security and intelligence divisions, in close collaboration with its media department, oversee the vetting of, and communication with, foreign agents.

During the “caliphate” era this evolved into a stereotyped process. As IS was guiding terrorists through an operation, a video would be sent to IS giving bay’a (an oath of allegiance) to the caliph. The bay’a video and/or a picture from it would then be released publicly after the attack, during which the terrorist was usually killed, providing definitive proof IS was responsible for their actions. IS was especially cautious when their operative has been arrested.

The basic structure and operating paradigm evidently remains in place to shield IS from political damage because this process has played out to the letter over Friday’s attack. As such, there little reason to doubt that Issa al-Hasan, the 26-year-old Syrian who surrendered to German police, acted on IS’s orders in Solingen.²

Thus, this is definitionally not a “lone wolf” attack. There are doubts that this typology exists at all in practice, and with IS it almost never applies. More germane to the Solingen attack, a significant number of attackers designated as “lone wolves” in the media transpire—whether or not they are provably remote-controlled by IS from “Syraq”—to be part of an on-the-ground network. This seems to be the case with Al-Hasan.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested before Al-Hasan was in custody “after two women reported overhearing a conversation between [the boy] and a second person in which they discussed the attack”. It has not been stated explicitly, but as the boy was arrested in a raid on a refugee home, it seems likely he is also of foreign origins. This has been a theme in the IS attacks in Germany, as we shall see.

ISLAMIC STATE’S HISTORICAL OPERATIONS IN GERMANY

Germany was the first State targeted by the Islamic State terrorism, in April 2002. The “Tawhid cell”, mostly comprised of Palestinians with various forms of legal residency, plotted to blow up the Jewish Museum in Berlin and a Jewish-owned bar in Dusseldorf. The cell leader, Mohamed Abu Dhess (Abu Ali), was in regular contact with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, IS’s founder. Zarqawi was based in Iran at the time, where Dhess met him to finalise the plan, and Zarqawi then remotely walked Dhess through every stage of the conspiracy.

Two things are notable about the Tawhid cell plot. First, the main features—carried out mostly by foreigners, directed by IS “Centre”, and an emphasis on Jews—have remained constant in IS’s activities in Germany down to the present day. Second, this was a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

The Islamic State’s terrorism against the West is not, as they have been at pains to emphasise, a response to “occupation” or any other temporal “grievance” resulting from Western foreign policy: the violence is an expression of IS’s ideological commitment to jihad, a war to the finish against the infidel world that can only be terminated when non-Muslims convert to Islam, accept subordination under the shari’a, or are physically annihilated.

The relative scarcity of IS attacks in the West before 2014 was due to strategic and prudential considerations.³ Up to 2011, Western soldiers were in Iraq, so there was no need to hunt abroad for Westerners to kill, and after the 2007-08 “defeat” of IS, the group limited its attacks even on Western troops to ensure that the planned withdrawal was not aborted. IS had learned from its mistakes and was quietly building up to its caliphate declaration in June 2014: drawing attention to their intentions and provoking counter-measures before they were ready to absorb them would have been unwise.

Three months after IS claimed to have restored the caliphate, on 21 September 2014, IS’s then-spokesman, Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani), gave a speech in which he notoriously declared:

[W]e call you [Muslims] up to defend the Islamic State … [D]o not let this battle pass you by wherever you may be. … Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. … If you are not able to find [a bomb] or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him. Do not lack. Do not be contemptible. … If you are unable to do so, then burn his home, car, or business. Or destroy his crops. If you are unable to do so, then spit in his face.

A worldwide wave of terrorism followed. IS’s 2014-17 foreign attacks had their centre of gravity in France, and IS was relatively late in striking Germany—the first attack in this wave was in February 2016—but once IS began, the campaign was intense, with Germany becoming the third-most targeted State by the end of 2016.

The six “successful” attacks were:

• 26 February 2016: Safia Schmitter, a Moroccan-German teenage girl, stabbed a police officer at a railway station in Hannover.

• 16 April 2016: Two German-born Muslim teenagers connected to the Salafi scene bombed a Sikh temple, injuring three people.

• 18 July 2016: Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, a 17-year-old Afghan, injured five people on a train to Würzburg with a knife and axe. This was the first attack IS publicly claimed.

• 24 July 2016: Mohammad Daleel, a Syrian asylum seeker, blew himself up outside a wine bar, near the entrance to a music festival in Ansbach, Bavaria, injuring fifteen people. Daleel’s backpack detonated early; his suicide bombing was intended to be far worse.

• 16 October 2016: A 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death and his girlfriend wounded in Hamburg by a 20-odd-year-old man of “southern appearance”, which in German parlance means an Arab or Turk.

• 19 December 2016: Anis Amri, a Tunisian asylum seeker, hijacked a truck and drove it into the Christmas market beside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, murdering twelve people and wounding more than fifty.

In between these attacks, five more IS terrorism operations were thwarted. Two of the would-be attacks were by Syrians and one by a Tunisian who had come into Germany among the migrants in 2015. Another of the botched attacks was by a boy born in Germany in 2004 to Iraqi parents. The final attempted attack was by IS operatives connected to the network behind the November 2015 Paris carnage and the March 2016 Brussels attacks, who appear to have been sent to Europe from IS Centre under the cover of the migrant flow with fake Syrian passports.

In-keeping with this pattern, Al-Hasan has been in Germany since December 2022 and holds “a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria”.

THE CURRENT ISLAMIC STATE GLOBAL TERRORISM WAVE

The wider context of the Solingen killings is similar to the last major phase of IS global terrorism, too. In the year or so before Falaha’s speech, IS had been engaged in foreign attacks. Some failed (e.g., Algerian-born Frenchman Ibrahim Boudina was arrested near Cannes in February 2014 “left of boom”) and some did not (e.g., Mehdi Nemmouche murdered four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May 2014), but whatever the outcome of the plots, lessons were being learned and a global network was being constructed that meant IS was ready to make good on its ostentatious threat. So it has been this time.

IS’s foreign attacks did not stop after the final remnant of the caliphate was swept away at Baghuz in March 2019, not least because the online external operations infrastructure was somewhat compartmentalised from the statehood project, but a number of the terrorism guides were obviously killed as the caliphate went down, creating some disarray, and IS’s focus on reconstituting its insurgent capacity in the active jihadist zones—Iraq and Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, West Africa, and the Philippines—made foreign attacks rarer. Europe also radically diminished as victim of these atrocities, which struck Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Britain, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, and Iran. This began to change last year.

In July 2023, an IS jihadist was arrested in Spain and seven in Germany. These men were mostly Tajiks who had come from Afghanistan, where the IS node is called Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). In September, IS(KP) operatives were arrested in Iran. In October 2023, IS carried out lethal attacks in France and Belgium for the first time since 2018. An IS network was rolled up in India in November as it planned widescale devastation. In early December 2023, France was hit by terrorism again when a man of Iranian descent, who had previously been imprisoned for trying to travel to the caliphate, murdered a tourist and wounded two others near the Eiffel Tower. At the end of December, Germany, Austria, and Kyrgyzstan arrested IS(KP) terrorists, Tajiks again, shortly before they executed plans for mass-murder and destruction at tourist and Christian sites. Iran was hit with a twin IS suicide bombing in the first week of January 2024 where the death toll reportedly approached 100.

Writing about this back in January, I noted that while IS’s external operations capacity was clearly well into a recovery, it was possible Europe would be spared—most of IS efforts over the preceding months had failed and European security services have tightened up a lot since 2014—but “the warning signs that something nasty is headed our way … are mounting up”, and, crucially, “the conditions are more propitious for the jihadists than they have been for some time”.

The “conditions” referred to were and are the increasing public displays and social acceptability of antisemitism in Europe in the wake of the 7 October Iran/HAMAS pogrom. The rape and slaughter of Jews on a scale unknown since the Holocaust electrified and emboldened antisemites in Europe, who initially turned out to overtly support HAMAS and celebrate the pogrom, and have since transitioned to protests accusing Israel of “genocide” and demanding a ceasefire that preserves HAMAS in power. IS detected an opportunity.

In Al-Naba, IS’s weekly newsletter, an editorial on 19 October 2023—days after the attacks in France and Belgium, and less than two weeks after the pogrom—called on Muslims everywhere to initiate a “hard and fast [terrorism campaign] to target the ‘Jewish presence’ all over the world”, especially in Europe and America, since “they constitute the backbone of the Jewish economy and the centres of control over the Western Crusader decision-makers who support the Jewish petty state”. Al-Naba insisted that to be successful, a war against the Jews would have to encompass attacks on Western Embassies, the Arab governments that are secretly friendly to Israel, and HAMAS, because it answers to the heretical Shi’is in Iran and fights for “nationalism”, when the only legitimate fight is for Islam.

IS’s current spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, made IS’s return to foreign attacks official on 4 January 2024, the day after the suicide attacks in Iran though recorded before. IS must have considered its international network to be robust enough by then to withstand the additional scrutiny such an announcement would bring. Framing the speech as IS’s answer to Israel’s campaign against HAMAS, Abu Hudhayfa insisted focusing on Gaza alone was futile—indeed, illegitimate, since obsessing over one piece of Muslim land borders on idolatry—and channelled Falaha from a decade earlier, almost verbatim in places:

[T]he Islamic State is mobilising its soldiers in particular and all Muslims … to target the Jews, the Crusaders, and their criminal allies in every land … O zealous monotheists: we call upon you today to renew your activity and revive the blessed operations in the heartlands of the Jews and the Christians … O lions of Islam, pursue your prey—the Jews, the Christians, and their allies—in the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Storm their homes, kill them, and torture them in every way you can. …

Blow them up with explosives; burn them with incendiary bombs; shoot them with bullets; slaughter them with knives to their necks; run them over and crush them with buses. The sincere one will not miss a trick in bleeding the hearts of the Jews, the Christians, and their allies—and healing the hearts of believing people. Attack them from every direction and kill them with the utmost cruelty. Turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres. Do not differentiate among infidels: civilian or soldier, they are all infidels, and the [divine] judgment upon them is the same. …

You should aim at easy targets before the difficult ones, the civilian ones before the military ones, and the religious targets—like synagogues and churches—before anything else, for that is what most heals the heart and delineates the terms of battle, [underlining that] our war with them is a religious war. We fight them wherever they are found in response to the command of God Almighty.

Three weeks later, IS terrorists murdered a Christian worshipper during Sunday service at the Catholic Church of Santa Maria in Turkey, the first of at least nine IS terrorist attacks around the world (and perhaps eleven) since Abu Hudhayfa’s speech.

An Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed on 2 March in Switzerland, a country where the rise in visible antisemitism has been particularly notable, by a teenage boy whose bay’a video was released the next day. The most horrific attack of this current wave took place in Russia on 22 March, with perhaps 150 people murdered at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow. Later in June, Russia was hit twice more—a hostage incident in Rostov and a grisly coordinated massacre at a church and a synagogue in Dagestan. In Serbia, a convert to Islam who gave bay’a to IS’s caliph injured a security guard at the Israeli Embassy with a crossbow on 29 June. IS in effect acknowledged all these attacks in Al-Naba in early July as part of an editorial about the group’s model for external operations.

IS jihadists attacked a Shi’a mosque in Oman on 15 July, murdering half-a-dozen people and wounding scores more. Three days ago, simultaneous with the Solingen attack, four people were murdered in an IS prison mutiny in Russia.

The stabbing of Assyrian Orthodox Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during Sunday service in Australia in April conforms to the kind of attack Abu Hudhayfa called for, matches closely what happened in Turkey, and the arrest of seven teenage boys involved in the crime disclosed some indications of IS affiliation, but IS has not announced its responsibility and the evidence is too ambiguous to say anything with certainty. Just as murky, shots were fired at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon on 5 June and the alleged perpetrator, a Syrian man, has been charged with membership in IS. As Iran/Hizballah control the Lebanese State makes legal claims from Beirut difficult to assess in any case, and Tehran’s political interest in portraying Sunni Syrians as jihadi-Salafists complicates things further.

Meanwhile, over the last eight months, multiple IS operatives planning attacks or financing those who are have been arrested in the United States, including Alexander Mercurio, an Idaho man arrested in April while planning to attack a church, exactly as Abu Hudhayfa suggested, and a contingent of IS-loyal Tajiks who were caught coming across the Mexican border in June. Spain carried out arrests in January and March. The alleged arrest of IS terrorists in Iran in April have to be viewed with some scepticism—the Islamic Republic uses “terrorism” charges loosely against dissidents—but the claim is plausible. An IS cell was busted in Morocco in early May and later that month another cell was neutralised in India. Days later, Sri Lanka arrested the handler of the Daeshis in India.

The string of arrests in Germany during this period is notable for both the scale and the seriousness, with the apprehended IS jihadists having much more developed plots, closer to execution.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

In terms of the implications of Solingen, therefore, part of what happened is that, as the Provisional Irish Republican Army famously said, “we have only to be lucky once”. Germany seems to have replaced France as the centre of IS activities in Europe this time around, and, with the pace of IS plots in Germany over the last year, it was always likely one would break through sooner or later.

A broader implication, not specific to Germany, was pinpointed by IS’s statement acknowledging responsibility for Solingen, which continued the strategy laid down by Abu Hudhayfa of attempting to leverage events in former Mandate Palestine. Last time, these statements would formulaically say the terrorist had acted in response to Falaha’s call for Muslims to assist the caliphate. This time, Amaq News Agency said the “soldier of the Islamic State” had carried out the attack “in revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere”. Note that even here, IS’s ideology means it cannot bring itself to make Palestine the issue. But the opportunity to capitalise on the popular hostility to Israel among Muslims by making Palestine an issue has evidently become too great to pass up. And the temptation is understandable.

The Islamic Revolution that holds Iran was being denounced by most Sunnis for its sectarian mass-murder of their brothers in Syria until recently, but one pogrom and a barrage of missiles against the Jews later, all is forgiven. IS has far fewer barriers to overcome in tapping into this sentiment. Perhaps Solingen will prove to be an outlier, rooted in the specifics of Germany—which would be bad enough. But perhaps not. It is easy to see a positive feedback loop forming that applies across the Continent and beyond, wherein IS is able to recruit those who wish to do violence against Jews and their perceived supporters, i.e. the whole West, providing them legitimation and direction, and in return IS gains prestige for leading the war against the Jews—playing to IS’s narrative that it acts, while the Arab governments and most other Islamists only talk—which brings in more recruits.

Post has been updated.

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NOTES

1. A recent example: the controversy at the end of 2022 over Turkey’s claims that it had arrested the caliph. IS denied this and was soon vindicated.

The major apparent exception, IS’s claim that Stephen Paddock, responsible for the massacre of sixty people in Las Vegas in October 2017, is an exception more in the nature of proving the rule. For one thing, the claim was made at a moment of intense turmoil for IS, months after it had been evicted from its Iraqi “capital”, Mosul, and weeks before it lost its Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, so it is possible that there was some breakdown of the usual process and/or that something was done in desperation, to deflect attention from the group’s defeat, which had not been done before and has not been done since.

More importantly, it remains unclear even now what Paddock’s motives were. The U.S. government has said it has no evidence that Paddock was in communication with IS before the atrocity, but this does not mean very much. The British government confidently stated Al-Qaeda played no direct part in the 7/7 attacks in 2005, and was then proven spectacularly wrong. With IS, the practice of operatives in Europe and elsewhere giving their bay’a to the caliph privately was entirely routine, leaving IS the choice of whether to make it public. If their operative was caught before they carried out an attack, IS’s silence hid the evidence of terrorist affiliations from the courts, and where operatives made an embarrassing hash of things or there was some other political warfare advantage, IS would likewise remain silent. The main indicator that Paddock was not acting at IS’s behest was that he killed himself, instead of continuing to murder as many people as he could before police killed him. This is hardly definitive, though.

2. In line with its privacy laws, Germany has only named the suspect as “Issa Al H.”, but his name has been reported by foreign outlets.

3. Brian Fishman (2016), The Master Plan: ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the Jihadi Strategy for Final Victory, p. 28.