Islamist terrorism continues. Biden has to confront it
As a string of brutal attacks in France in recent weeks reminds us, Islamist terrorism is far from dead.
Because the pathology largely spared the United States during the past couple years, it won little attention in our election. And yet, it surely will rise — sooner or later — to the top of Presidentelect Biden’s agenda.
Anyone who thinks the end of the so-called Islamic State in 2019 destroyed the threat has only to look at France and across Africa.
The Tunisian who shouted “Allahu akbar” after knifing three people to death in Nice on Oct. 29 may have been inspired by the decapitation of a history teacher near Paris on Oct. 16 by a Chechen refugee.
Or, perhaps the knifing of two people three weeks earlier in Paris near the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine drove them both. The publication may have infuriated them by republishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as those accused of aiding the 2015 attack against its staff stood trial.
But the root cause was Islamist terrorism, a virus barely slowed by COVID-19, even as the world has looked elsewhere. The French attacks should remind Westerners of the ugliness rampant on the African continent.
Consider the gory examples: The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara murdered six French aid workers and two others in a Niger safari park attack in August. A week before, Boko Haram killed 16 and wounded six in Cameroon.
In March, Boko Haram killed at least 69 people and razed a village in Nigeria. A couple months before, an al-Shabab suicide bomber in Somalia killed four people.
The toxin that is terrorism has not abated, just moved. In its 2019 “Country Report on Terrorism,” the U.S. State Department warned that surviving ISIS leaders welcomed affiliates throughout Africa. Such ISIS supporters launched attacks in Asia, including the killing of more than 250 people on Easter Sunday in 2019 in Sri Lanka. In the United States, a Saudi killed three people and wounded eight at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, in December 2019.
For Americans and others who escaped such horrors in the past couple of years, it’s easy to think the problem has been solved.
The indictment in October of two British jihadis in the murders of American aid workers Peter
Kassig and Kayla Mueller and journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley seem like moppingup operations.
So, too, does the recent transfer of four ISIS supporters, including Moroccan-born Minnesotan Abdelhamid Al-Madioum, to the United States to stand trial. Al-Madioum, 18 when he joined ISIS mid-2015, was among more than 50 Americans — many from Minnesota’s Somali-American community — who joined, tried to join or supported terrorist groups beginning in 2007.
History tells us that Islamist doctrine can be contained for a time, but soon springs up anew. Until the World Trade Center towers fell in 2001, most Americans had dim memories of the
1993 bombing there that killed six people and hurt over 1,000. Many were likely oblivious to attacks on transit systems in France in 1995. And many likely forgot that bombers killed 224 and wounded over 4,500 in 1998 at U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Americans paid close attention after 2001. But terrorists largely laid low until 2008, when Islamists — led partly by an American — killed more than 166 in Mumbai. Five years later, terrorists killed 67 in a Nairobi shopping mall (in early October, two men were convicted in Kenya). Attacks climbed after ISIS set up the Caliphate in 2014, attracting more than 40,000 fighters from nearly 100 countries.
Terrorists moved into the United States with the 2015 spree by a married couple in San Bernardino, who killed 14 and hurt 22. The following year, an ISIS supporter killed 49 and hurt 53 in a nightclub in Florida.
And in 2016, a jihadi bomber hurt 31 in New York and New Jersey. Then a Somali American hurt 11 in a bizarre car-ramming and stabbing spree at Ohio State University.
In 2017, an Uzbek Islamist killed eight people and hurt a dozen in New York City, followed two weeks before Christmas by an attempted suicide bombing at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.
President Trump declared ISIS defeated in December 2018, although the real end of ISIS’s territorial hold in Syria came on March 23, 2019, when Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) took over Baghouz. Still, ISIS inspired attacks in Kenya, Syria, Somalia, France, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Philippines.
COVID-19 will be vanquished. But, if the French attacks and recent history prove anything, it’s that Islamist fanaticism will endure. And the West, especially President Biden, must remain awake to its threats.