Does the Manchester Attack Show the Islamic
State’s Strength or Weakness?
By Robin Wright
Ten hours
after Salman Abedi blew himself up outside the Manchester Arena, where the
American pop star Ariana Grande was performing, ISIS claimed a grisly attack
that killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more. “With Allah’s grace and
support, a soldier of the Khilafah (caliphate) managed to place explosive
devices in the midst of the gatherings of the Crusaders in the British city of
Manchester,” the group boasted on social messaging apps, in multiple languages.
The odd thing—for a group that has usually been judicious about its claims and
accurate in its facts—is that it got key details wrong.
The
discrepancies were conspicuous—and clumsy. In one early claim, the message
referred to a “security detachment,” as if there were multiple operatives. It
implied that the attack involved multiple bombs left on site. It missed the
fact that a lone bomb had been detonated in a single suicide operation. It did
not refer to a “martyr,” as it usually does when perpetrators are killed. It
did not name or claim Abedi.
“It looks
like the work of ISIS,” a U.S. counterterrorism official told me on Monday,
although the British investigation was ongoing. Yet the mistakes also spurred
speculation about ISIS’s command of foreign operations, its communications with
operatives or sympathizers, and even its access to news, which had already
reported the basics of the attack. Just how much has ISIS been disrupted?
Read on....
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