The attack in Nice, France that killed at least 84 people poses new questions regarding ISIS claims of responsibility: Does the automatic assumption of ISIS involvement, even before the group makes an official statement, boost the group’s image and prestige? If proof of an oath of allegiance, known as bay’ah, by the perpetrator is not found in this instance, what does that mean for the group’s standard of accepting responsibility for inspired attacks? And why does ISIS publicly accept some attacks and stay silent on others?
The lack of an oath of allegiance or other firm ties to ISIS make the Nice attack of particular note, considering other ISIS claims of responsibility.
The Monday axe attack by a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker in Germany, for instance, was claimed on Tuesday by ISIS. The group released a video allegedly showing the attacker presenting himself as a “soldier of the caliphate”; ISIS then claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its Amaq News Agency.
Neither ISIS nor French authorities have yet to release any evidence firmly tying the Nice Bastille Day attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, to ISIS. AFP reported that French prosecutor François Molins said in a Monday press conference that although there is no evidence yet of the attacker’s allegiance to ISIS, he "showed a clear, recent interest for the radical jihadist movement."
The attacker had violent images related to terrorism on his computer and his recent Internet search history included past attacks in Orlando, Florida, and in the Paris suburb of Magnanville, Molins said. The Nice attack was premediated and planned, the prosecutor said, and Bouhlel appears to have visited the site prior to the attack and had studied videos of violent crashes.
However, ISIS did not immediately claim responsibility for the Thursday attack. It wasn’t until Saturday that ISIS issued a bulletin on Amaq saying the attacker was a “soldier of the Islamic State. He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fight the Islamic State.” Amaq cited an “insider source” in its claim.
Claiming these acts is a “validation” of ISIS’ strategy, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and the director of Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, said. That strategy has two prongs — one is dedicated to having operatives in place who respond to direct orders and commands, and the other is about mobilizing, inspiring, and ultimately animating individuals to carry out acts of violence.
“The perpetrators themselves have given these acts a political label,” Hoffman said. “Whether it’s an allegiance or a relationship that’s new or old, they’ve given this the political label.”
The oath of allegiance
If no oath of allegiance to ISIS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — which the group has called for attackers to offer before or during attacks inspired, or not directly planned, by ISIS — is found in the Nice attack, this would seem to mark the “first instance” of the group claiming an attack without some evidence of bay’ah, Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said.
“ISIS doesn’t generally claim responsibility for mass casualty attacks that they don’t actually direct or inspire,” he said. “But when they have inspired attacks, like in Orlando and San Bernardino, they’ve always waited for some kind of evidence of an oath of allegiance to Baghdadi before going out and claiming it. They make sure some kind of linkage is there before claiming responsibility.”
Given that ISIS has now claimed an attack without such a direct link yet being made, it raises the question of what “standards” the group will adhere to in terms of taking responsibility for inspired attacks, he said.
“It’s tough to say what they’re thinking these days, but it might be the case the standards they used to practice have been getting a bit loose,” Amarasingam said. “It might be enough for a media linkage to be made, or an Imam or religious leader in the city that is supportive of them says they knew this guy…three degrees of separation might be enough. But in the wording they use to claim responsibility, it’s always ‘supporter’ or ‘soldier’ or ‘fighter’ in Arabic. They don’t say, ‘We inspired someone to do something,’ they say, ‘He is connected.’”
The investigation in Nice is ongoing, but “this would be the very first attack” where there is not yet a clear oath of allegiance, Amarasingam said.
Recent incidents with claims of responsibility made by ISIS underscore the significance of inspired attackers pledging allegiance, as the group has called for repeatedly in the propaganda it disseminates. In June, for example, the Orlando attacker told a 911 operator he was pledging allegiance to ISIS, while in December’s San Bernardino mass shooting the couple posted their oath on Facebook. And in the June Magnanville killings, the perpetrator entered the home of the couple he stabbed and then livestreamed his declaration of allegiance to ISIS on Facebook.
ISIS has typically been “very careful” when they claim credit for an attack and when they don’t, according to Amarasingam.
Going forward, given ISIS’ increased losses on the battlefield, the group “might not have the resources and time to go about confirming these kinds of things and might depend more on the media on connecting the dots,” he suggested.
In the case of the Nice attacker, Hoffman pointed out that ISIS “used terminology that’s generally used for the types of attacks that have had some previous connection” to the group. With the evidence known so far, it’s “clear with” Bouhlel that “this isn’t just the case of someone rolling out of bed one morning” and deciding to commit this act, Hoffman said.
When ISIS doesn’t make a claim
It is also important to assess the attacks where ISIS has not claimed responsibility. Take the three attacks in Saudi Arabia earlier this month or many recent attacks in Turkey, most notably at Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Why has ISIS been silent on these attacks, even as the group has been linked to the violence?
In Turkey, ISIS has claimed responsibility for targeted assassinations, such as the murders of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently activists, but not for mass casualty attacks like the one in Istanbul last month. ISIS has “benefited strategically from not claiming those,” Amarasingam said.
“What they want to create in Turkey is a bit of finger pointing — they want chaos in Turkey, where the government blames the Kurds, (and) the Kurds blame the government,” Amarasingam said. “They want a kind of uneasiness of what’s going on that allows them to thrive and exist in the country.”
The simultaneous attacks in Saudi Arabia were also not claimed by ISIS, although CIA Director John Brennan said recently that “those three attacks, I think, were the work of” the group. That was less about strategy, Amarasingam said, and more about the specific reaction to those incidents, and particularly the choice of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina as a target.
“They don’t want the Saudi government to actually get too heavily involved in a counter-ISIS campaign, but part of it is also a more hearts and minds situation,” according to Amarasingam.
He noted that the conversation after the attack on Telegram, the app ISIS often uses for messaging, shifted from a celebration that an “apostate monarchy had been attacked,” to an immediate “pullback on that.” The conversation then emphasized it was merely security guards who died and that the attack happened in the parking lot, rather than the mosque itself.
“They were kind of blown away, maybe, by the rhetoric of the general Muslim community and by Al Qaeda condemning the attack,” he said. “In Saudi, there was kind of a popular appeal, hearts and minds strategy being played, but not claiming responsibility in Turkey is for actual strategic reasons.”
Prestige and the loss of territory
The immediate assumption of ISIS’ connection or responsibility for an attack may boost the group’s appearance of capability, whether or not it makes the official claim, experts say.
“I think it’s really detrimental when in the very early stages of an attack like this, everybody automatically says, ‘Oh, this must be ISIS,’ because it affords the group with this kind of invincible image. I think in many respects, the media is building this group up to be more capable than it is,” Colin Clarke, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, told The Cipher Brief last week.
In a way, Patrick Skinner, Cipher Brief expert and Director of Special Projects at The Soufan Group, told The Cipher Brief, whether or not it was ISIS behind the attack “doesn’t really matter” for the group’s prestige to its followers.
“In the early hours after the attack, the debate was over, ‘Is this actually an ISIS attack?’ —which is the exact same one we had in Orlando and San Bernardino,” he said. “In a way it doesn’t really matter, because they are going to say it is, and people will believe it.”
While there has been much debate over whether the increase in attacks is due to ISIS’ loss of territory in Iraq and Syria, experts warn that assumption is far from clear cut. It is “tough to say whether the increase in attacks is happening because of the loss of territory or whether it’s just taken a year or two for these branches, networks, or inspirations to solidify and actually carry themselves out,” Amarasingam said.
Hoffman, meanwhile, said the idea that there has been an increase in attacks directed or inspired by ISIS due to the loss of territory is a “red herring.”
“This represents, I think, a much longer process that ISIS has deliberately pursued for more than two years,” Hoffman said. “Their external operations army operates independently of what’s going on on the battlefield. It may make us feel better to think that these are the spasms of a dying organization, and it may well be, but there’s no shelf life on how long that is going to take to pan out. I don’t think there is a clear end in sight.”
These attacks inspired and claimed by ISIS play directly into the group’s strategy, Hoffman said.
“They’re hoping that by so preoccupying and distracting law enforcement and intelligence with the independent threats, this firstly reveals important policies and procedures ISIS can use to plan attacks, but more so that one of the major, more important attacks will sneak through,” Hoffman said.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
