Military failures push IS to launch more terror attacks
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E-mail Xinhua, June 23, 2017
The spate of military failures suffered by the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and Iraq will push it to launch more terror attacks in the West, a senior Iraqi expert told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on Thursday.
Terror attacks across the United Kingdom, France and Belgium have killed dozens of people since March, while the IS militants are being cornered in Mosul and Raqqa, its de factor capitals in Iraq and Syria.
"The loss of IS in Mosul and Raqqa will push the terrorist group to find an alternative land for the Jihad against what they name apostates," said Abdullah al-Jubouri, an Iraqi army officer and security expert.
Jubouri pointed to several reasons behind the increasing terror attacks in Europe.
The reasons include "the killing of many of its best commanders, divisions in its ranks, fear of treachery, the decrease of people volunteering to be suicide bombers, in addition to losing the revenues of oil sells after they lost control of many oil fields in Iraq and Syria," he said.
Moreover, the IS finds it effective to encourage suicide bombers to cause panic in European society, as "they can cause much more damage" and "really make the enemy afraid."
"The group can get people prepared to be suicide bombers in Europe and they can cause much more damage. So the fight is moving to the 'enemy land', including the West," Jubouri concluded.
According to the expert, it is a dangerous tendency that the terror attacks are carried out by individuals inspired by radical ideology rather than by terrorists directly linked to the IS machinery.
"The individuals inspired by Jihad are very dangerous, very creative and also difficult to identify. There is no group decision-making process, so they are basically free to act upon any scenario they think up," he said.
"They are even not asking for instructions," Jubouri said, adding that the IS prefers to just provide "self-motivated individuals tools and techniques to act independently."
Jubouri believes that the main motivation for Muslim extremists to carry out attacks across Europe recently is revenge.
"Revenge was one of the motives of some IS attacks in Europe, as it responds to the pressure against its strongholds with counter-attacks in multiple distant places," Jubouri said.
The extremists carry terror attacks "in order to undermine public support for involvement in the anti-IS international coalition," he added.
MASS MIGRATION CRISIS CONTRIBUTES TO INCREASED TERROR ATTACKS IN EUROPE
To some extent, the worsening security situation in Europe is self-inflicted given its inadequacy to address the mass migration crisis in the continent since 2015, Jubouri said.
"It is believed that such (terror) networks are fairly widespread in Europe, as Europe's mass migration crisis since 2015 has provided cover for the networks to infiltrate in the continent," he noted.
The European governments were doing almost nothing to stop jihadists from going to Syria and Iraq to join IS group, the Iraqi expert said.
"Now Europe has to face a generation-long struggle to deal with thousands of jihadists returning as the IS caliphate is collapsing," he lamented.
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