For several years, ISIS’ online propaganda magazine has been called Dabiq. The magazine – a mixture of incitement to terrorism and Wahhabi preaching for borderline retards – took its name from the town of Dabiq in north east Syria. An ancient Islamic prophesy picked the place out as the scene of a decisive battle between Muslims and the ‘Romans’ (i.e. Western forces), at which Jesus would return, declare Himself a Muslim and lead the Islamic army to victory.
Having seized Dabiq, ISIS have spent several years telling their supporters that the final battle would soon rage there. Now, however, the town is likely to fall to a US-backed Arab/Kurdish coalition. Which will make something of a mess of the IS propaganda about it being the imminent scene of the ‘Last Battle’.
So the terror gang have rejigged their online propaganda, in order to give their followers a new focus and a new target.
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Hence their new online terror mag is now called Rumiyah, which means Rome. And whereas the old Dabiq focused heavily on the military successes of Islamic State armies in Syria and Iraq(compete with heavy weapons supplied by Saudi Arabia and the USA), its successor spends much more time extolling the virtues of low-tech, lone wolf terror attacks.
A recent wave of Jihadi murders in Bangladesh are held up as examples, but the main target the magazine proposes is Western nations.
The new issue urges lone jihadists to arm themselves with weapons to carry out a ‘campaign of knife attacks’ in quiet neighbourhoods. ISIS urges would-be jihadists to ‘overcome their squeamishness’ which it said was ‘never an excuse for abandoning jihad’.
The terror group makes the call in the second edition of magazine Rumiyah, meaning Rome, which was issued by the organisation’s Al-Hayat Media Centre.
The article urges would-be jihadists to launch their assaults at night timeon random victims in alleys, beaches, forests, and ‘quiet neighbourhoods’, and aim for a ‘reasonable kill count.’ ‘Drunken kaffirs’ are suggested as ideal targets.
In the latest PDF edition, which has been distributed widely on social media, supporters are urged to arm themselves with readily-available weapons and launch a ‘campaign of knife attacks’ in which the attacker ‘could dispose of his weapon after each use, finding no difficulty in acquiring another one.’
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In the call for waves of attacks in the West, an article in the magazine says: ‘One need not be a military expert or a martial arts master, or even own a gun or rifle in order to carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorize an entire nation.’
Urging followers to carry out brutal acts of violence, the article continues: ‘Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh.
‘It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after ‘modernization’ distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war.
The shocking article goes on to advise would-be terrorists on which weapons to use and how to use them to maximum effect (See picture)
‘It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives, as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter,’ it reads, adding: ‘to avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing.’
The significance of the switch of name and emphasis has not yet been pointed out anywhere else, so let us spell it out:
ISIS are being hammered in the Middle East and their much-vaunted ‘Caliphate’ faces military defeat and total collapse.
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In order to regain the initiative and continue to recruit and secure funding, they have no choice but to relocate a large part of their operation to ‘safe territory’ where Syrian, Shia, Kurdish and Turkish forces cannot follow on the ground and Russian, Syria and Nato warplanes cannot strike them from the air.
So as the geography and mythology Dabiq becomes untenable, Western cities become an organisational and morale imperative as safe, soft and prestige targets. ISIS must strike – and strike hard and repeatedly – in Europe, or die.
What should the West do? 1) Close the borders; 2) Stop all Saudi and other Gulf funding for Salafist front groups and mosques; 3) Round up and expel all terror suspects, 4) Make peace with the Syrian and Russian governments, and pool intelligence and military resources in order to kill every possible Jihadist in Syria, before they are able to join the rat run which has already seen thousands of ISIS and Al Nusra fighters slip into the West as sleepers.
Anything else is madness, for which innocent citizens will pay a terrible price.
