ISIS Recruits Lone Wolf Stabbing Serial Killers, Calls For Knife Attacks To ‘Terrorize An Entire Nation’

ISIS has upped the ante for spreading terrorism in its name, using a propaganda magazine to call for lone wolf jihadists around the world to engage in serial knife attacks to kill and terrorize as many “disbelievers” as possible. The ISIS recruits that employ this tactic, they insist, will be more difficult for police to apprehend and, therefore, will be able to “terrorize an entire nation.”

Express reported this week that ISIS propaganda magazine Rumiyah (translated: Rome) posted an article wherein the Islamic State suggested that jihadi recruits should begin using knives in their attacks to increase the body count against disbelievers. Listed were several reasons why knife attacks were preferable to using handguns or rifles: easy use, easily disposed of and (re)acquired, and one does not have to be an expert in knife usage.

The article proposed a “campaign of knife attacks” to “carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorize an entire nation.” There were even directions on the types of knives to be used.

Kitchen knives, the author noted, were not “designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter,” so it was suggested that a jihadi should “avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing.”

The article also revealed that ISIS was displeased with the West’s use of the term “lone wolf” and suggested that their members use the term “just terror operations” — with “just” in reference to “justice” — to describe their attacks.

The Rumiyah article is the latest in ISIS’ move to change its tactics with regard to recruiting new extremists to its cause. As the Islamic State has lost territory to the Russian-backed Syrians, the U.S-backed Iraqis, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and an assortment of Syrian and Iraqi militia groups aligned against it, the policy of recruiting members to travel to fight in the Middle East changed to proselytizing and recruiting new extremists to carry out attacks in their home countries. These attacks have ranged in size from the numerous lone wolf attacks with knives in Europe to the group-orchestrated assaults with guns and explosives in Paris and Brussels.

The new emphasis on knife attacks appears to play to ideas of range and mobility, number, unexpectedness, and relative anonymity (for the attacker) while at the same time causing the most trepidation within a populace. The tactics are an extension of the Islamic State’s alteration of its overall strategy for its continued existence, a strategy laid out in detail in its official propaganda magazine, Dabiq. Not only were lone wolf and small, organized terrorist cell attacks encouraged, ISIS made it clear that it was a member’s duty to Islam (according to the extremist organization) to attack and kill as many disbelievers as possible. But instead of recruiting fighters to come to the Middle East to attempt and bolster the now shrinking caliphate (which was self-declared by ISIS in June 2014) the fighters are now being told to wreak terroristic havoc in their home countries.

And while video clips and magazines like Dabiq and Rumiyah push for a more dispersed (and terror-infusing) kind of terroristic warfare against ISIS’ perceived enemies, the Islamic State has also instituted a reign of terror within its controlled territories, with many of the most horrific stories of the extremists’ so-called sharia justice coming out of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. As the Inquisitr has reported, the Islamic State has executed hundreds of the city’s citizens for various crimes, including collaborating with the enemy and even attempting to leave ISIS-controlled territory. ISIS has sentenced and burned alive young women who refused to “marry” (read: become sex slaves for) their fighters, summarily shot women who protested against its rule, used a chainsaw to cut prisoners in half and welding tools to kill youths accused of belonging to resistance factions, and even buried alive its own fighters attempting to retreat from battle.

[Feature Image by igorstevanovic/Shutterstock]