Now is no time for complacency: Our viewSo vast and disorienting was the Easter Sunday carnage strewn by coordinated suicide bombings on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka that investigators at first overestimated the death toll. Sri Lanka suffered nearly twice the number killed in Paris in a similarly coordinated fashion by ISIS attackers in 2015. Eight Islamic State branches and a dozen networks operate around the world, along with an unknown number of sleeper cells. Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has appeared in a video for the first time since 2014, praising the Sri Lanka attacks. The island nation of Sri Lanka, with its history of civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2009, was in many ways a perfect host for this viral extremism.

Source: The North Africa Journal April 29, 2019 22:41 UTC