Examples of this have already been seen from ISIS and Al-Qaeda in their coronavirus messaging. In addition to urging its followers to repent because the coronavirus was a punishment from God for non-Muslims, ISIS told its followers to show no mercy and launch attacks in this time of crisis. In its Al-Naba newsletter, the former caliphate said that supporters should take maximum advantage while the national and international security regimes that help keep the group in check are about to be overloaded. Though the group has recommended that members do not travel to western countries to launch attacks, it has said that those already present should act.
A report by the International Crisis Group said that Al-Naba editorial’s exhortation to violence is not news for the former caliphate, but what matters instead is “what the group is capable of and what its operating context allows. If that context becomes more permissive – as this editorial anticipates – ISIS can better organise and execute resource-intensive, complex attacks, at substantial human cost.”
This was the essential message of Crisis Group’s 2016 report, “Exploiting Disorder: al-Qaeda and the Islamic State”: the growth of jihadist groups in recent years has more often been the result of war and chaos than its primary cause. ISIS, for one, became a global threat largely by taking advantage of local conflict and state failure in Syria, only to then rampage through Iraq and attempt to export its model globally.
According to the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), it’s easy to see why ISIS would want to exploit any opening it can: “The U.S. and its allies have systematically targeted ISIS’s international terrorist wing, thereby limiting the jihadists’ ability to launch spectacular attacks in the West.”
Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, released a five-plus page statement calling on civilians in Western nations to convert to Islam during the coronavirus pandemic. According to Thomas Joscelyn, executive director of the Center for Law and Counter-terrorism at (FDD), “Al-Qaeda portrays the virus as Allah's retribution, arguing that the West is immoral and [in decline]. Therefore, according to the group, Western citizens should convert to Islam which is supposedly superior with respect to hygiene and morality.”
In Somalia, the leader of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda's branch in East Africa, said the group rejoiced in the suffering of the US and its European allies. “Coronavirus has uncovered the weakness of those who claimed to be superpowers such US, France, Italy, Germany and Britain,” Fu’ad Mohamed Khalaf told a congregation in a mosque in an al-Shabaab-controlled area of southern Somalia, according to the group’s news channels.
The FDD's Joscelyn noted that al-Shabaab, which controls swaths of territory and is fighting local government forces backed by US airstrikes and other African troops, “blames African forces for supposedly spreading the virus throughout the region and claims it is providing educational instruction to Somalis concerning how to deal with it.”
“This is an example of how Shabaab is attempting to portray itself as a responsible governing body," he continued. "The Taliban is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, releasing photos and statements on COVID-19 that are intended to [enhance] its legitimacy as an Islamic emirate.”
As well as providing an opportunity for militants, the pandemic may undermine the international effort against Islamist extremism as governments re-task their military capacity to support the public health response, making countries even more vulnerable to attacks, some experts say.
“It is almost certainly correct that COVID-19 will handicap domestic security efforts and international counter-ISIS cooperation, allowing the jihadists to better prepare spectacular terror attacks and escalate campaigns of insurgent warfare on battlefields worldwide,” the International Crisis Group said.
Iraq, where the pandemic has prompted the UK, France and Spain to withdraw their troops, citing the risk of contagion and a related pause in the training of Iraqi forces, has seen a surge in attacks by ISIS this month. The Crisis Group says that if international Coalition support, already destabilised by U.S.-Iran tensions, “is further endangered by coronavirus and Coalition member countries’ understandable tendency to retrench, an Iraqi state that is itself grappling with an outbreak will likely struggle to contain ISIS insurgents as well.”
The Iraqi military are meanwhile distracted by disaster relief, enforcing a nationwide curfew, and looking after their own health and that of their families. Left to operate without being pressured and chased from hideout to hideout, ISIS has been getting more ambitious at local level. “In Khanaqin District, close to the Iran-Iraq border, IS quadrupled its average number of mortar and rocket attacks in March and combined the bombardments with sustained machine-gun fire and ground assaults on security force outposts,” wrote Michael Knights, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in Politico.
Knights predicts that ISIS’ next steps involve “disruption to security force clearance operations will increase IS’ ability to make advanced roadside bombs in its hideouts and use these weapons, and other harassment tactics, to keep the security forces buttoned down in their bases.”
If left unchecked, the insurgents will become the local power brokers, and it will no longer be possible to claim that IS’ days of territorial control are over. This, he says, is how the former caliphate will knit itself back together, one village at a time. “This is exactly how it happened in 2012-14, after the previous U.S. withdrawal,” he said.
There are signs elsewhere that the militaries of the US, Britain and other countries are also pulling back because of the virus, leaving a possible opening for the extremists. That’s a particular danger in Africa’s hot spots of the Sahel, the Lake Chad region and Somalia, where the U.S. military already worried allies in recent months by contemplating cuts to focus on threats from China and Russia.
“Any state that was interested in pulling back in Africa will take the opportunity to do so,” said Clionadh Raleigh, executive director of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks extremists’ activities worldwide. “That will be unbelievably bad.”
A U.S. Africa Command spokeswoman, Lt. Christina Gibson, told The Associated Press that “while the size and scope of some AFRICOM activities have been adjusted to ensure the safety and protection of forces — both U.S. and partner nation — our commitment to Africa endures.” She did not give details of affected operations but said AFRICOM still has about 5,200 forces on the continent at any given time.
Though analysts say it is too soon to point to attacks that could be blamed specifically on militants exploiting the coronavirus, more than 50 people were massacred in an attack in northern Mozambique by Islamist extremists suspected to be part of the ISIS after locals refused to be recruited to its rank, it was reported on April 22. Almost a month earlier, on March 24, ISIS insurgents took over a strategic port in Mozambique and hoisted their flag in what may herald the establishment of a new outpost for the so-called caliphate. On the same day, the faction of ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram led by Abubakar Shekau killed ninety-two Chadian soldiers in an ambush around the Lake Chad area, and at least forty-seven Nigerian soldiers died in northeastern Nigeria in in their deadliest assault yet against the military of Chad. Similarly, jihadists affiliated to al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine soldiers in Mali on March 19.
To manage the risk of escalation in these tense regions, the Crisis Group has urged governments to keep peace efforts and conflict prevention efforts alive and to maintain back channels. “Crisis Group has argued that coronavirus could even be a chance for “humanitarian de-escalation”, between the U.S. and Iran in particular. The flip side, though, is that if this pandemic disrupts existing international cooperation – or even sparks new conflict – ISIS is poised to capitalise.”
The group says that harm will require continued international counter-ISIS cooperation and support for the front-line countries that have suffered most at the hands of an enemy whose “chauvinist, intolerant ideology is the opposite of the sort of humanitarianism this moment demands.”
