Adnani in Syria, impressing his boss by recruiting French-speaking jihadists.Īccording to activists from Aleppo Province in Syria, Mr. Abaaoud, who was killed in a shootout with the police in Paris last week, worked under Mr. France is next with almost 20 in the same time frame, he said.įrench intelligence officials believe that Mr. Lesaca’s analysis shows that Russia has received the most threats from the Islamic State in its videos, with more than 25 in two years.
Adnani’s stature and operational focus are also revealed in an analysis of nearly 1,000 video messages the Islamic State has disseminated over social media in the past two years, which was conducted by Javier Lesaca, a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s school of media and public affairs. Olsen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Adnani has been a key figure in external planning since ISIS rose to prominence over a year ago,” said Matthew G. Adnani now has a $5 million bounty on his head, offered by the United States, and is on the kill list for the American-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria. Do not ask for anyone’s advice.”Īs a result, Mr. “Then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however it may be. “If you can, kill a disbelieving American or European - especially the spiteful and filthy French - or an Australian, or a Canadian,” he said. Adnani is best known for a 42-minute audio statement issued on social media in September 2014 in which he called on individual Muslims living in the West to kill civilians in their countries by any means necessary, and to do so without waiting for further instructions from the terrorist group’s leaders. Adnani has drawn intensified scrutiny from Western officials. But it is in his role as head of external operations that Mr. “Once the Islamic State possessed territory that provided them sanctuary and allowed them to act with impunity, they like other jihadist groups inevitably turned to external attacks,” said William Wechsler, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and until last January a top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.Īccording to American and European officials, the man overseeing the attacks outside Iraq and Syria is Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a 38-year-old Syrian who is the official spokesman for the Islamic State and one of the most trusted lieutenants of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s supreme leader. And it upends the view held by the United States and its allies of the Islamic State as a regional threat, with a new assessment that the group poses a whole new set of risks. The Islamic State’s overseas operations planning cell offers strategic guidance, training and funding for actions aimed at inflicting the maximum possible civilian casualties, but leaves the task of picking the time, place and manner of the attacks largely to trusted operatives on the ground, the officials said.Ĭarrying out attacks far from the Islamic State’s base in Iraq and Syria represents an evolution of the group’s previous model of exhorting followers to take up arms wherever they live - but without significant help from the group. WASHINGTON - The recent attacks in Paris and Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner in Egypt were the first results of a centrally planned terrorism campaign by a wing of the Islamic State leadership that oversees “external” targets, according to American and European intelligence officials.
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