Defying Western efforts to confront the Islamic State on the battlefield, the group has evolved in its reach and organisational ability, with increasingly dangerous hubs outside Iraq and Syria and strategies that call for using spectacular acts of violence against civilians.
The massacre in Paris on Friday, following bombings in Beirut and the downing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt, all claimed by the Islamic State, reveals a terrorist organisation that has changed in significant ways from the West’s initial understanding of it as a group focused on holding territory in Syria and Iraq and building a caliphate, or Islamic state.
The Islamic State has for the first time engaged in what appears to be a centrally planned campaign of terrorist attacks aimed at inflicting huge civilian casualties on distant territory, forcing many counterterrorism officials in the United States and in Europe to recalibrate their assessment of the group.
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“They have crossed some kind of Rubicon,” said William McCants, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of
“They have definitely shifted in their thinking about targeting their enemies.”
When the Islamic State’s Egyptian arm claimed responsibility for blowing up a Russian charter plane over Sinai two weeks ago, some analysts wondered if the group’s Sinai Province of the Islamic State had acted on its own and leapt out in front, even at the cost of risking a Russian military backlash on the parent group in Syria and Iraq.
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But the attacks last week in Paris and Beirut, which the Islamic State also said it carried out, appear to have settled that question and convinced even sceptics that the central leadership was calling the shots. “There is a radical change of perception by the terrorists that they can now act in Paris just as they act in Syria or Baghdad,” said Mathieu Guidère, a terrorism specialist at the University of Toulouse.
“With this action, a psychological barrier has been broken.”
Indeed, at a time when many Western officials were most concerned about IS-inspired lone-wolf attacks — terrifying in their randomness but relatively low in casualties — the attacks in Paris have revived the spectre of coordinated, high-casualty attacks planned with the involvement of a relatively large number of perpetrators.
U.S. and European authorities said the assault bore the hallmarks of attacks conducted by al-Qaeda.
“Their goal is an unconventional urban guerrilla war,” said Franck Chaix, an officer of the Gendarmerie, France’s semi-military police force.
— New York Times News Service