Monday, July 4, 2016

Week of Death & Destruction in the Muslim World

It is often claimed that Islam is a religion of peace, but how is it substantiated looking at the pictures below?

ISIS' Ramadan terror campaign

(CNN) July 3, 2016

In the past two weeks, ISIS has conducted lethal terrorist attacks in Bangladesh, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, and also, very likely, in Turkey. None of this should be too surprising. After all, ISIS explicitly called for terrorist attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which commenced four weeks ago.
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the spokesman for ISIS, released an audiotape in late May in which he called for attacks, saying, "Ramadan, the month of conquest and jihad... make it a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers."
Seemingly a result of that call, ISIS or its affiliated groups started carrying out multiple attacks across the Middle East. Suicide attackers blew themselves up in a Christian village in Lebanon close to the Syrian border, killing five people.
Also on Monday, a wave of ISIS suicide attacks in Yemen in the southeastern city of Mukalla killed more than 40.
On Tuesday, ISIS claimed credit for a suicide attack that a week earlier had killed seven Jordanian security personnel at a border crossing between Jordan and Syria.
The same day, the Istanbul airport was attacked by three suicide bombers who were almost certainly dispatched by ISIS.
In the past three weeks, ISIS-inspired attackers also struck in the West, first in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed in a gay nightclub -- the most lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 -- and, the day after the Orlando attack, an ISIS terrorist killed a police official and his partner in a town outside Paris.
Unfortunately, we may see more attacks. For Islamist terrorist groups such as ISIS, the holy month of Ramadan -- a time of fasting and prayer for the vast majority of Muslims -- is seen as a particularly auspicious time to launch terrorist attacks.
This is especially the case around the 27th day of Ramadan, the "Night of Power," which is a particularly sacred day for the world's Muslims as it was the time that the Prophet Mohammed started receiving the first verses of the Koran.
On the Night of Power in 2000, which that year fell on January 3, al Qaeda militants attempted to launch a suicide attack against the American warship USS The Sullivans off the coast of Yemen with a bomb-filled boat. The attack failed.
This year, the 27th day of Ramadan fell on July 2. This is the same day that the ISIS attackers in Bangladesh completed their massacre at the restaurant in Dhaka. The militants were all killed by Bengali forces.
The 27th day of Ramadan is also the same day that ISIS launched the attack that killed at least 125 in Baghdad.
If indeed the attacks at Istanbul's airport are the work of ISIS, it would fit into the terrorist organization's current strategy to attack commercial aviation targets. In March, two ISIS suicide bombers launched the attacks at the Brussels airport that killed 15.
In October, ISIS' Egyptian affiliate brought down a Russian commercial jet leaving Sinai airport, killing all 224 people on board, the deadliest attack on commercial aviation since 9/11.
ISIS also has ample motivation to want to attack Turkey. Where the Turks once had a laissez-faire attitude to the tens of thousands of "foreign fighters" who have transited Turkey to join ISIS in neighboring Syria, now the Turks have substantially cut down on ISIS recruits traveling though their country.
In 2015, ISIS, in one of its English language online publications, advised would-be foreign fighters hoping to join the group that, "Turkish intelligence agencies are in no way friends of the Islamic State [ISIS]."
Turkey has also allowed the United States to fly bombing missions aimed at ISIS from airports on Turkish soil.
 






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