IS Creates Global Network Like Al-Qaeda
The Islamic State terrorist army is collecting an increasing number of followers outside its home in Syria and Iraq in what is shaping up as a global enterprise to commit mass killings and destabilize governments.
In Libya alone, there are at least six Islamic State-aligned terrorist cells, according to a Feb. 18 report by the nonprofit Institute for the Study of War. On Egypt’s other flank, another Islamic State group showed it could carry out complex deadly attacks in the Sinai Peninsula.
Last month, the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS, announced it had set up its terrorism shop on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and recruited leaders from the Pakistan and Afghanistan Taliban.
Islamic State recruiting cells have sprung up in Morocco, Algeria and other North African states. Supporters are waving its black flag in a number of Muslim-majority countries.
“The bottom line: Are we seeing those guys expanding their territorial hold or are they falling back?” said former CIA analyst Larry Johnson. “It sure looks to me like they’re expanding.”
The Islamic State seems to be following the franchise system started in the 2000s by al Qaeda — and then multiplying it.
Al Qaeda expanded from the Pakistani tribal belts as its operators were hunted down and killed.
Today, the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) stands as the greatest threat to the U.S. homeland. A number of al Qaeda affiliates sprung up in North Africa and played a role in the deadly attacks on the American diplomatic post and CIA base in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
The Islamic State also is expanding into North Africa and the Middle East as its army is being pummeled by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in its conquered lands in Syria and Iraq.
Its most successful expansion to date is Libya, where it claims its own province. Eastern Libya is a hotbed of violent Muslim groups, several of which have pledged to the Islamic State and its cleric leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the killings of 21 Egyptian Christians working in Libya and for a deadly attack on a hotel in Tripoli.
The Islamic State also won allegiance from a Sinai-based terrorist group, Sinai Province of the Islamic State, which last month carried out a series of attacks that killed at least 27 Egyptian soldiers….