Sri Lanka shows the deadly reach of the Islamic State
(Asanka
Brendon Ratnayake for the Washington Post)
A week after enduring hideous
violence on their holiest of days, Sri Lankan Christians largely stayed
away from their places of worship. The archbishop of
Colombo conducted a televised mass
from his home on Sunday out of safety concerns for his flock — still
reeling after a coordinated series of suicide bombings that killed more
than 250 people in churches and hotels on both sides of the country.
The attacks were claimed by the
Islamic State, and some officials floated the possibility that it was
intended to be retaliation for a white
supremacist’s assault on two mosques in New Zealand. The specter of an
international Islamist militant plot hung over the island nation. The
Islamic State’s online propaganda arm released images of the suspected
ringleader of the attack, accompanied by seven scarf-clad followers,
declaring allegiance to the extremist group and its leader, Abu
Bakr-al-Baghdadi.
In response, Sri Lankan authorities
snatched up dozens of potential suspects over the course of the week,
including 48 people over the weekend, while uncovering various caches of
weapons and bombmaking material. Full curfews went into effect in parts of
the country. Late Friday, at least 15 people died during a raid by government
troops on a house in the eastern town of Sainthamaruthu. According to police reports,
some suspected militants detonated their own bombs as security forces
approached, killing themselves along with six children and three women also
inside the home, while others died in a subsequent shootout.
“Ripped pieces of clothing were
scattered on the ground together with bullet casings,” my colleagues reported from
the crime scene the following day. “Torn sheaves of paper with the
hadith — the sayings of the prophet Muhammad — were strewn in two places.”
Police
carry a dead body of a suspected terrorist in a body bag and place it into
the back of a police truck on April 27 in the small town of Sainthamaruthu
on the east coast of Sri Lanka. (Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/For the
Washington Post)
The exact logistical link between
the local militants and the Islamic State is still unclear. But
the attacks in Sri Lanka showed the enduring ability of this brutal
extremist organization to inspire violence throughout the world. The group
has this capacity even as it has lost its territorial fiefdoms in war-torn
Iraq and Syria, arenas where President Trump has desperately sought to
declare victory over Islamist militants.
"We should not be too
dismissive of ISIS claims or capabilities,” Juan Zarate, a former deputy
national security adviser for counterterrorism in the George W. Bush administration,
said to my colleagues. “I do
think it is possible that ISIS has communicated directly or embedded with
these local groups and found a way of helping plot, amplify and supercharge
their capabilities and operational effectiveness on the ground. The ISIS
diaspora and expertise is real, and ISIS has global designs — in South Asia
and elsewhere.”
“The Islamic State is like an
international conglomerate that has untethered itself from the costly,
time-consuming business of operating retail bricks and mortar,” wrote James Stavridis,
former supreme allied commander of NATO. “A global map showing ISIS inspired or conducted attacks is
revealing, far beyond anything al-Qaeda has managed. And, no question, it
will continue to conduct lethal attacks, seeking over time to obtain
weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, radiological and cyber.”
Rather than a one-off, argued terrorism experts
Charlie Winter and Aymenn al-Tamimi, the attacks in Sri Lanka ought to
be seen as a “test run” for what the Islamic State can potentially achieve
elsewhere. Indeed, the attacks themselves may offer proof to the Islamist
militants’ sympathizers that the organization is capable of thriving far
from its now-lost dusty redoubts in the Middle East.
They pointed to a proximate historical
precedent: “Back in 2004, the Islamic State’s predecessor, al-Qaeda in
Iraq, or AQI, was militarily defeated in Fallujah — a city it had been
occupying for six months alongside other insurgents. At the time, the
group’s then leader, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, framed territorial defeat as a
tactical setback in the short term, but a strategic victory in the long
term. He asserted that Fallujah mattered most because of what the battle
for the city said about AQI. It put AQI on the map, he claimed, showing it
to be a viable force capable of fighting the ‘crusaders’ head-on and
globalizing its ideology. That, he said, was priceless. Sure, AQI was
materially weakened, but that didn’t matter, because at the very same time
it had been ideologically strengthened.”
The organization that eventually
evolved out of AQI? None other than the Islamic State.
A
blown-out wall and debris inside the house next to the one rented by
suspected terrorists, which was destroyed following a suicide bombing on
April 27 in the small town of Sainthamaruthu on the east coast of Sri
Lanka. (Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The Washington Post)
In Sri Lanka, the
Islamist militants found a particularly vulnerable target. A
political rift between the country’s president and prime minister is being
blamed in part for the security lapses leading
up to the bombings, including the depressing fact that officials within
the government apparently did not act on tips concerning the likely threat
of an attack.
Now, there’s a risk that it could
overcompensate. “We had to declare an emergency situation to suppress
terrorists and ensure a peaceful environment in the country,” said Sri
Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena. “Every household in the country will
be checked” and lists of all residents made to “ensure that no unknown
person can live anywhere.”
Those are already flaring. Local
officials told reporters that hundreds of Muslim refugees
of the Ahmadiyah sect — who initially fled to Sri Lanka from Pakistan
to flee religious persecution — have now gone into hiding out of fear of
reprisal attacks.
It’s another sign of what extremist
plots can achieve. “People are terribly scared,” Russell Eardle, a British
Sri Lankan man, said to my colleagues last week.
“They are peaceful, and they don’t know who is to blame. But if another
religion has done this, it could be the beginning of another war, which
nobody wants.”
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