By\u00a0Robin Wright, April 23, 2019<\/p>\n
Exactly a month after losing its final piece of territory, the Islamic State is giving notice that it can still surprise the world\u2014this time in Sri Lanka<\/a>. On Tuesday, it claimed responsibility for Easter bombings of three churches and three popular hotels which killed more than three hundred innocent civilians, including more than forty children, and injured another five hundred. \u201cThe perpetrators of the attack that targeted nationals of the coalition states and Christians in Sri Lanka were from the ranks of the fighters of the Islamic State,\u201d the isis<\/em> news agency, Amaq, claimed in its chat rooms on Telegram, a social-media app. \u201cCoalition\u201d refers to an international alliance of more than seventy countries that ousted isis<\/em> from its territory in the Middle East. A second isis<\/em> communique included a video of eight men standing in front of the black-and-white isis<\/em> flag, seven with their faces covered by black-and-white kaffiyehs, as they pledged bayat<\/em>, or allegiance, to the Islamic State. The communique identified each man who targeted each site on an \u201cinfidel holiday.\u201d<\/p>\n Evidence beyond the claim is far from definitive. But Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said, at a press conference, that government officials had early suspicions about ties between isis<\/em> and two local Muslim extremist groups. So did U.S. counterterrorism officials. \u201cEveryone believes there was some kind of external link because of the sophistication of the attack,\u201d a U.S. official told me.<\/p>\n The scope of the attacks in Sri Lanka reflects the ongoing danger from extremist movements, whether isis<\/em>, Al Qaeda, their offshoots, or their wannabes. The routing of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in 2001, and the death of Osama bin Laden, a decade later, did not eliminate Al Qaeda. Today, the group has active branches in the Arabian peninsula and North Africa, and it controls a strategic Syrian province on the border with Turkey. In the past two years, isis<\/em>has lost territory the size of Britain inside Syria and Iraq, but it still has eight official branches and more than two dozen networks regularly conducting terrorist and insurgent operations across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, according to the U.S. National Strategy for Counterterrorism.<\/p>\n \u201cisis<\/em> has, of course, been badly battered, but territory and terrorism have never been co-terminus, and, in this respect, isis\u2019<\/em>s ideology and capacity to engage in violence far from its former battlefields still exists,\u201d Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism specialist at Georgetown University and author of the book \u201cInside Terrorism<\/a>,\u201d told me. Killing a terrorist group\u2019s leaders or diminishing the physical territory that it controls \u201cis not the same as undermining its ideology or destroying its raison d\u2019\u00eatre. Revenge and retaliation arguably infused isis<\/em> with newfound purpose and energy.\u201d<\/p>\n In a speech to Parliament, on Tuesday, Wickremesinghe said that a preliminary investigation indicated that the Sri Lanka bombings were in retaliation for the New Zealand assaults<\/a>, although he provided no proof. Hoffman said that isis<\/em>moved quickly to exploit last month\u2019s attacks on two mosques in New Zealand, which killed fifty people, to justify and energize new attacks and \u201cto make itself again relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n isis<\/em> still has its brand and an ability to inspire, Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism specialist and the author of \u201cAnatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State<\/a>,\u201d told me. Even though more than a hundred of its senior leaders have been killed, and tens of thousands of its fighters and followers have been captured, the movement knows how to exploit local tensions for its own purposes. \u201cMost isis<\/em> provinces across the world build on pre\u00ebxisting conflicts with sectarian, ethnic, and religious divisions,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is true from Boko Haram<\/a> in Nigeria to Ansar Bayt al Maqdis in the Sinai to Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines.\u201d<\/p>\n The self-declared isis<\/em> caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, remains free. He pushed for global attacks as the caliphate lost its territory. In 2016, he called<\/a> on isis<\/em>\u201csoldiers\u201d outside the caliphate to launch attacks against infidels worldwide. In an audio message, in 2017, Baghdadi appealed<\/a> to his followers to \u201cbeware\u201d of \u201cthe feeling of defeat.\u201d Instead, he said, \u201cOh Soldiers of the Caliphate, fan the flames of war on your enemies, take it to them and besiege them in every corner, and stand fast and courageous.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018, isis<\/em> was linked with at least three thousand six hundred and seventy attacks worldwide, according to the BBC monitoring service. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for more than three hundred attacks in Afghanistan, more than a hundred and eighty in Egypt, about six dozen in Somalia, more than forty each in Nigeria and Yemen, and twenty-seven in the Philippines.<\/p>\n