ISIS’s Bloody Week: “Rivers of Blood” In Yemen and Terror in Tunisia

Its been a banner month for ISIS across the world. As the American public has been following stories like Hillary’s Email Gate the terror group has been experiencing explosive growth across the Middle East and Africa. Yesterday in Yemen, where the group was thought to have a negligible presence (if any), two suicide bombers struck at two Houthi-Shia mosques killing 130 people in a bloody attack that resulted in “rivers of blood” flowing through the streets.

Destruction in one of the Houthi Mosques in Yemen Friday, photo credit USAToday

How did ISIS pull off their rapid expansion in Yemen when the predominant terror group in the area has been Al Queda in Yemen (AQAP)? Well, it seems that ISIS did not appreciate it when AQAP came out late last year to claim that the ISIS “caliphate” was illegitimate since the group had been attacking Houthi Shia Muslims. AQAP found this practice contrary to Islamic teaching. ISIS had felt that AQAP had not been “doing enough to target Houthi’s”. The take over of a town called Sanaa by Houthi’s evidently boosted recruitments efforts, but with this attack ISIS seems to have issued quite a challenge to AQAP and Yemen.

“ISIS appears now to have laid down the gauntlet, declaring its attacks Friday were the “tip of the iceberg.” In targeting the Houthi mosques in Sanaa, ISIS would be quite deliberately repeating the sectarian strategy of its founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who launched a devastating suicide bombing on Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, which plunged Iraq into a full-blown sectarian civil war. Al-Zarqawi correctly calculated that the Shia, infuriated by the attack on their most sacred shrines, would violently retaliate, driving Sunnis into the embrace of the jihadis. Yemen appears now to be on the brink of a similar civil war.”

ISIS terror “spectacular” wasn’t localized to just the Middle East this week though. In Tunisia on Wednesday, the group attacked the Bardo Museum in an attack that is being compared to the 1997 attack on tourists visiting the pyramids at Luxor in Egypt. Evidently the tide of Islamists has been rising in that region of Africa ever since militants were released from jail in 2011 in the wake of that countries revolution during the “Arab Spring”.

Police gather outside the Bardo Museum in Tunisia, photo credit ABC News

“One of those who was freed from jail was Seifallah ben Hassine — also known as Abu Iyyad — a veteran Tunisian Jihadi who worked with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1990s and founded the Tunisian Combatant group. Soon after he was released he founded Ansar al Shariah in Tunisia, a pro-Jihadi movement which has up to 40,000 followers.

The group has a similar outlook to its namesake in Libya which the United States says carried out the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and according to Geoff Porter, a terrorism expert at North Africa Risk Consulting, there are real and fluid links between the two groups.”

So while John Kerry was consoling Dr. Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, on the loss of his mother yesterday and Obama was busy trying to ignore Bibi Netanyahu’s re-election in Israel ISIS continued its bloody rampage across the Islamic world gaining even more support. Way to go guys!

 

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