Daesh and the coronavirus: from prevention to opportunity

For Daesh, the coronavirus has been many things. In the imagination of the terrorist network, the pandemic was characterised in different ways: as God's punishment of the infidels, as a threat to be avoided, and even as a potential weapon - in the event that the terrorist in question managed, once infected, to spread the pathogen to more people.

So, as the pandemic has spread to different corners of the world, Daesh's still quite powerful communication ecosystem has shaped the messages it sends to its followers. First, when the first cases were recorded in and around Wuhan, the virus was presented as God's punishment of the infidels and a prelude to what could be the Day of Judgment.

Why was it hitting China? According to the jihadist group, it was a form of divine execution of the Beijing regime, which was responsible for the imprisonment and torture of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs -mainly Muslim- in concentration camps in Xinjiang province. In view of the increasing spread of the virus outside the Asian country, Daesh's leaders called on citizens to "seek help from Almighty God to prevent the disease and keep it away from their countries.

Weeks later, however, the virus jumped to Iran - where Shiism, also a staunch enemy of groups like Daesh, dominates - to other parts of the Middle East and to Europe, where some of the most lethal attacks in the group's history have been carried out: Bataclan, Brussels, Nice... 

Consequently, countries such as Italy, Spain and France - to name but a few - have been left in a compromising position of increasing weakness. Many of their security forces and armies have been assigned to the fight against COVID-19. It could have been thought, from the point of view of organisations such as Daesh, that the fight against terrorism, along with other priorities, could have taken a back seat (although operations such as the one carried out last week in Almería testify to the contrary).

The message given by the terrorist group was apparently contradictory, with guidelines for action that seemed to say one thing and the opposite. In an edition of Al-Naba magazine published in mid-March, coinciding with the start of the confinement in most of the EU territory, Daesh, as many public administrations at all levels have done, provided its own rules for its acolytes to deal with the virus.

Among the recommendations, dressed in an epic and grandiloquent tone, were to cover your mouth when yawning and sneezing, to wash your hands frequently... In short, minimum daily actions to guarantee personal hygiene. What is more significant, however, is that the readers were also called upon not to enter the territories where the infection was advancing. "Those who are healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the sick should not leave it," the communiqué read.

A premise, at the very least, very cautious, even more so if one considers who is proposing it. However, in the same publication, Daesh called on his followers to be merciless and to launch attacks while the crisis lasts.

So, on the one hand, it was urged to move away from those territories where the virus was spreading most strongly. On the other hand, and in the opposite direction, they continued to call for the commission of terrorist acts. So, can we speak of a contradiction? Not necessarily: for those who were already on European soil, for example, the prevailing order was to attack.

Leaving aside purely sanitary instructions, Daesh's call to action has prompted several unstructured individuals to carry out various attacks on European soil in the name of the jihad. The last one took place in Germany, but, during April, two other attacks were recorded in France.

The city of Hanau, a town of just over 100,000 near Frankfurt, made headlines around the world in mid-February this year when a far-right terrorist named Tobias Rathjen murdered 10 people in a shisha bar. The manifesto he left behind made clear the racist and Islamophobic motivations for the attack.

More than two months later, the same town has experienced another similar episode. Two people were arrested on 28 April after four walkers were stabbed. Witnesses interviewed by Teutonic media said that the attackers were in fact in a group of five or six. 

The two detainees are two males, a 23-year-old Albanian and a 26-year-old Syrian, according to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. The German police have not yet provided any further details and have said, according to the German magazine Focus, that they are still investigating the reasons for the attack.

The episode in Hanau was not the first terrorist act on European soil during the lockdown periods decreed by the respective governments. Just a few hours earlier, a driver drove into a police station in Colombes, on the outskirts of Paris. The hit-and-run left two officers injured.

According to the local newspaper Le Parisien, the man, before his statement, confessed that he made the decision to commit the attack after having accessed videos on the situation in the Gaza Strip and made several references to Daesh. He was identified as Youssef T., 29 years old, born in France, with a psychiatric and criminal record. He was sentenced to social services in 2010 for committing several violent acts.

Despite his medical file, the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) was informed of the case and took over the investigation.

On 4 April, an individual stabbed seven people in the French town of Romans-sur-Isère, in the department of Drôme, about 100 km south of Lyon.

According to the data collected by France Bleu Drôme Ardèche, the man was an inhabitant of the town, described by his neighbours as "gentle" and "pacifist". His attack began in a cigarette shop, where he stabbed the couple who ran the shop and a customer who was in the establishment. Later, he walked to a downtown butcher shop, where he took another knife and stabbed a person. Outside the establishment, he continued to injure more passers-by in front of a supermarket.

He was arrested shortly afterwards by the security forces. At the time of his arrest, he was kneeling in the middle of the street while reciting a prayer in Arabic, according to witnesses quoted by Gallic media. FranceInfo has revealed that the arrested man was a 33-year-old Sudanese citizen who was granted refugee status in 2017. He was working in a local furrier's after having followed a vocational training programme provided by the Government for new arrivals. The investigation was also handed over to the PNAT.