ISIS Calls for 'All Out War' on West During Ramadan

      
ISIS called for an “all out war” on the West during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which begins Friday evening, just days after it claimed the Manchester suicide bomb attack that left 22 people dead.

The group’s spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, killed in a U.S. airstrike in August 2016, had made similar calls for attacks ahead of the holy month in the past two years. This year’s message again comes again in an audio but it is unclear if it is delivered by the group’s new spokesman, Adnani’s successor Abu Hassan al-Muhajir.
Circulated on ISIS’s official ‘Nashir’ channels on encrypted messaging app Telegram, the Arabic-language audio message and accompanying slideshow directs the latest propaganda message to its “soldiers” and calls for attacks on Western “homes, their markets, their roads, and their forums.” It said the “targeting of civilians is beloved to us and the most effective...may you get great reward in Ramadan.”
“Know that our war with our enemy is all-out war,” it reads in English, according to images shared by terrorism expert Michael S. Smith II, who regularly tracks jihadi communications.
Read more: The Manchester attack network—Abedi, his accomplices, and a trail from Libya to Europe
The call continues the group’s tradition of demanding attacks beyond its territory in Iraq and Syria. As of December 2016, the group controlled 60,400 square miles, compared to 78,000 in January of that year, according to London-based defense consultancy IHS. Past messages were followed by a spike in attacks in Europe and the U.S. during the holy month. In 2016, Adnani called Ramadan “the month of conquest and jihad,” telling international supporters to carry out assaults at home instead of attempting to travel to Iraq and Syria.
“Because ISIS sees jihad as one of the most noble acts a Muslim can engage in, Ramadan becomes that much more significant,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based counter-extremism think tank. “Rewards in the afterlife for attacks during Ramadan are seen as that much greater. This is one of the reasons for the flurry of attacks during Ramadan.”
During the month of Ramadan in 2016, ISIS supporters—either directed or inspired—carried out deadly assaults in Orlando (49 killed), Nice (86 killed), Dhaka (22 killed), Istanbul (41 killed) and Baghdad (323 killed). Two French jihadis also slit the throat of a priest, killing him instantly, near the northern French town of Rouen. In its weekly Al Naba magazine, ISIS later boasted of its success in killing more than 500 people during the Islamic celebration.