The attack by two knife-wielding assailants on a church outside Rouen, Normandy, Tuesday in which the attackers killed an elderly priest by slitting his throat and gravely wounded a hostage appears to have been quite deliberately targeted at the Catholic church.
The attack by two knife-wielding assailants on a church outside Rouen, Normandy, Tuesday in which the attackers killed an elderly priest by slitting his throat and gravely wounded a hostage appears to have been quite deliberately targeted at the Catholic church.
The goal in going after such a
provocative target? To trigger a backlash against Muslims in France and
drive the country's Muslims into the recruiting arms of the Islamic
State.
The attackers filmed the atrocity, a nun who managed to escape told CNN affiliate BFM.
According to French President Francois
Hollande, the attackers claimed they were acting on behalf of ISIS,
something the group also claimed via an affiliated news agency.
A
French intelligence source told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that one of
the attackers had been radicalized after the Charlie Hebdo killings and
had tried to enter Syria on two occasions and was associated with Maxime Hauchard, another French jihadi who appeared in an ISIS beheading video in 2014.
In
recent weeks European intelligence services have detected a
significantly expanded effort by ISIS operatives in Syria and Iraq to
directly reach out to extremists in Europe to encourage them to launch
attacks. European counter-terrorism officials believe the group is
trying to project an image of strength and unleash vengeance, as it loses ground in Syria, Iraq and Libya. This month has already seen ISIS supporters in Europe launch two attacks in Bavaria and a deadly truck rampage in Nice.
ISIS 'aiming to stoke backlash'
ISIS
listed French churches as targets in the fifth issue of its French
language magazine which came out last summer "to create fear in their
hearts."
In April 2015 French police thwarted an ISIS directed plot to attack a church in Villejuif
in the Paris area after the operative recruited to launch the attack --
Sid Ahmed Ghlam, an Algerian student in Paris -- accidently shot
himself in the leg. Ghlam had twice traveled to Turkey where he met
French ISIS operatives linked to Fabien Clain, a senior French ISIS member who later is believed to have helped mastermind the November 2015 Paris attacks.
In urging attacks on churches, ISIS is
trying to eliminate what it calls the "grey zone" for Muslims in the
West by provoking a far-right backlash. A drumbeat of attacks in France
has led to a groundswell of anti-Muslim anger, which is being stoked and
exploited by far-right politicians.
According to France's National Human Rights Commission (CNCDH) there were 429 anti-Muslim threats and
attacks in 2015 -- a rise of 223% from the previous year. Marine Le
Pen, the leader of France's far-right national front, reacted to
Tuesday's atrocity by renewing calls for fundamentalist mosques in
France to be shut.
ISIS declared an all-out war on Christianity when its fighters beheaded 21 Coptic Christians near Sirte,
Libya, in February 2015. "You have seen us [in Syria] chopping off the
heads of those carrying the cross [and now] we will fight you
altogether," a masked fighter with a North American accent stated in
gruesome video featuring waves of blood flowing northwards into the
Mediterranean. The message could not have been clearer: the "Crusader"
enemy and all Christians were now seen as one and the same, and all
needed to be exterminated.
ISIS campaign branded genocide
In
March the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry characterized the ISIS
campaign against Christians and minority religions in areas under its
control as a genocide.
Not
only has the group driven out Christian populations from cities such as
Mosul, but it has targeted them for death across the Middle East,
including in Egypt where a local Islamic State affiliate has
assassinated Coptic priests. In Nigeria, ISIS affiliate Boko Haram
killed more than 4,000 Christians last year and attacked almost 200 churches, according to figures compiled by a Nigerian Christian organization.
Also in March, suspected ISIS militants in Yemen carried out an attack on a Catholic retirement home in Aden killing 16 -- and a Pakistani Taliban splinter group which has been supportive of ISIS targeted Christians in an Easter attack in a park in Lahore, killing 69 people.
It
turned out most of the victims in the Lahore attack were Muslim, as
were a third of those killed in the Nice truck rampage earlier this
month, exposing ISIS to potential criticism among jihadis that it is
shedding the blood of Muslims.
By going after churches, ISIS and its supporters are singling out Christians, and trying to usher in a new war of religions.
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