Was ISIS behind the failed attack on Pam Geller’s Muhammad cartoon event in Garland, Texas? Today ISIS has taken responsibility for the attack and claimed more will be coming. Predictably, right-wingers have swelled at this claim of responsibility to elevate the significance of the attack and claim that ISIS has mounted its first attack on the US mainland.
Let’s wait to see if there turns out to be any evidence at all for this claim.
It’s easy and predictable that a group like ISIS would try to take the credit for an incident like this. And we may find out that ISIS leaders did order the attack or were in contact with the assailants. There is at least some evidence that the two, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were admirers of ISIS.
But ISIS has been good at playing the western media with various forms of propaganda, often claiming growth overseas by finding this or that group willing to make some statement of common cause or allegiance. But it’s also important to be aware of the ways domestic hardliners in the US make a tacit and unspoken common cause with these groups. In fact, after rolling over a major chunk of Iraq in the summer of 2014 and submitting various Iraqi religious and ethnic minorities (as well as many Sunnis) to a genuine rein of terror, ISIS has been in retreat basically everywhere every since.
I wanted to call your attention to this paper published last week by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, a think tank of sorts at the military academy – ‘The Cult of the Offensive: The Islamic State on Defense‘. I quote from the introduction (emphasis added)…
The Islamic State has been on the defensive in Iraq for more than eight months and it has lost practically every battle it has fought. After peaking in August 2014, its area of control has shrunk, slowly but steadily. The group’s ability to control terrain has been dictated largely by the weakness of its opponents. When the Iraqi security forces (ISF) and the Kurdish Peshmerga have committed resources to an attack they have dislodged the Islamic State’s defenses, particularly when Western airpower, intelligence, and planning have been a large part of the mix.
This paper will use case studies from recent battles in north-central Iraq to argue that the Islamic State has a distinctive defensive operational style and that this style has many exploitable weaknesses as the coalition considers new offensives in Anbar province and Mosul. In many ways, the Islamic State’s defensive style is reminiscent of the German military between 1944 and 1945: At the tactical level they are highly dangerous and can still win engagements, but at the operational level they lack strategic coherence and they display a chronic inability to defend terrain.
I don’t know. And I’m pretty sure ‘we’ don’t know whether these two fairly hapless jihadis had any operational ties or even communication with ISIS. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising. But I would be highly skeptical that this is anything more than an opportunistic effort to grab media attention and try to terrorize Americans. ISIS is good at this. Consider how ISIS vastly expanded its reputation and fearsome status with a handful of gruesome and barbaric videotaped executions even while it was slowly losing territory on all fronts.
Let’s not be played.
