How did the Islamic State's rise reshape jihadist plots inside Australia? Part 2

ANDREW ZAMMIT • March 13, 2019

Part 1 showed that Australia’s jihadist plots had transformed following the rise of Islamic State in 2014, summarised in the table below:

From September 2014 to the end of 2018, Australia experienced a greater number of jihadist plots, but the cells were smaller and the attack methods were simpler. The plots usually relied on knives and firearms rather than explosives, and often targeted police officers. Australia’s jihadist plots became more likely to involve women and children as perpetrators and less likely to involve people who had trained in jihadist camps abroad. They also proved more likely to harm people, causing five deaths and several injuries.

This post, Part 2, explores how the Islamic State’s rise helped prompt this transformation.

The post looks at how the organisation achieved its global reach, the sorts of instructions it gave to aspiring attackers across the world, specific Australian circumstances, and the question of how police became such a prominent target.

THE ISLAMIC STATE’S GLOBAL REACH

In large part, the transformation resulted from the Islamic State’s dramatically successful transnational mobilisation efforts.

The most well-known, and widely-studied, aspect of this was Islamic State’s extensive use of social media. It made its biggest impact on Twitter, which was estimated to have between 46,000 and 90,000 pro-Islamic State accounts at one point, though the group artificially inflated its Twitter presence through bots and apps. Twitter shut down tens of thousands of accounts in response, which reduced Islamic State’s Twitter presence but did not eliminate it. Islamic State also reached out to potential supporters through Facebook and YouTube, as well as smaller and more secure messaging platforms such as Telegram, Surespot, WhatsApp, Diaspora, Friendica, Threema and many others.

Social media was just one of many mechanisms the Islamic State used to mobilise support. They also maintained their own media productions, producing videos and magazines. They were able to spread their message by gaining saturation coverage from mainstream media, maintaining attention through visceral acts of violence and often unfounded claims. They also reached out directly to other jihadist groups to co-opt them. And they forcibly imposed their propaganda wherever they gained a territorial foothold.

The content of their propaganda was no less important than their means of distributing it. The Islamic State did not only repeat familiar jihadist themes (that Western states and apostate rulers were waging a war on Islam requiring a violent struggle in response) but also emphasised its own distinctive themes. It portrayed itself as a militarily unstoppable force that was constantly expanding, as a functioning state which had created a utopian society, and as the divinely sanctioned re-establishment of the historic Caliphate. Its propaganda also embraced unashamed brutality, open sectarianism, and the notion of an impending apocalypse. 

Most importantly, there were concrete realities behind some of their propaganda. Following its mid-2014 military conquests, the Islamic State controlled vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. Though they would lose almost all of this territory by the end of 2017, they temporarily put their enemies on the back foot. For a period of time aspiring supporters could travel from almost anywhere in the world to access the supposed Caliphate through Turkey.

This was itself all possible due to deeper factors, including the failure to resolve the Syrian civil war, the legacy of the US invasion of Iraq, widespread despair in the aftermath of the failed Arab Spring, longstanding grievances against Western foreign policies, and the perceived decline of Islamic State’s rival, al-Qaeda.

Therefore, Islamic State’s propaganda themes, the methods it used to promote them, and broader factors that helped make this propaganda compelling for some audiences, gave the organisation a global reach greater than al-Qaeda had been able to achieve.

This escalated the jihadist threat inside Australia in much the way that it escalated the threat in many countries. It has been estimated that up to 40,000 foreigners from over 100 countries joined Islamic State and similar groups, so there was no reason to expect Australia to have escaped this.

When Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called on sympathisers to launch attacks in their home countries on September 2014, it helped spur an escalation of jihadist violence worldwide. The increased number of plots in Australia from 2014 onwards was far from unique.

THE ISLAMIC STATE’S ATTACK MESSAGING: SIMPLICITY AND SPEED

Islamic State’s propaganda also provided quite specific instructions on how to carry out attacks, which helps explain how the style of these plots changed.

Whereas Australia’s pre-2014 jihadist plots tended to be planned over a long time, Islamic State’s messaging emphasised the urgent need for supporters to attack quickly. Whether through publications like Dabiq and Rumiyah magazine, or through direct instructions, the Islamic State tended to emphasise simple attack methods. Al-Adnani’s speeches stressed that a single person, attacking with just a knife or even a rock, could help further their cause. This partly helps explain the small cell size, simple planning, and reliance of knives and firearms, among most of Australia’s post-2014 jihadist plots.

The increased involvement of children (people under the age of 18) in Australia’s jihadist plots is similarly consistent with Islamic State’s messaging, which called on children to play a violent role. Islamic State propaganda often featured children executing hostages or carrying out suicide bombings. The group eulogised child “martyrs” and described its child fighters as “Cubs of the Caliphate”.

The increased involvement of women, however, is not necessarily consistent with Islamic State’s messaging. Their propaganda had generally, but not entirely, eschewed combat roles for women. Scholars have debated whether the Islamic State maintained a general prohibition on women in combat, and whether this prohibition had been dropped when the group’s military fortunes collapsed. Some have argued that the Islamic State had maintained a consistent position of treating combat roles for women as undesirable but permissible in emergency circumstances.

In many countries, female Islamic State supporters had been having the same debate. In November 2015 it was wrongly reported that a woman involved with the Paris massacre had used a suicide belt to kill herself and several police officers raiding her safehouse. Though the report turned out to be false, it spurred debate among online jihadist communities about whether this showed that Islamic State now approved suicide bombings by women. In addition, the Islamic State sometimes used female attackers for its virtually planned attacks, despite its general disavowal of combat roles for women.

Consequently, there may have been an informal understanding that Islamic State endorsed women undertaking external operations, regardless of its official position. Moreover, many female Islamic State supporters may have been willing to act without the need for explicit approval. The increased involvement of women in Australia’s jihadist plots was again part of a wider international trend.

Australian women have also supported Islamic State in ways that go beyond violent plots. Fatima Elomar was convicted for trying to bring supplies to her husband, Islamic State fighter Mohamed Elomar. South Australian woman Zainab Abdirahman-Khalif was found guilty of being an Islamic State member (she had not left Australia, but pledged allegiance from her home). A Sydney woman was charged for allegedly trying to send $30,000 to her brother, who was also fighting in Syria for Islamic State. This is similarly consistent with international trends. Islamic State propaganda emphasises that it wants women play a large part in the movement, but generally as supporters and enablers rather than combat roles.

AUSTRALIAN CIRCUMSTANCES

Some aspects of the threat are more distinctive to Australia. The relatively simple attack methods are partly a result of Islamic State’s messaging, as covered above, but also stem from the difficulties of preparing more ambitious attacks in Australia.

For example, gun control measures introduced after the in 1996 Port Arthur massacre have ended up having counter-terrorism benefits, because terrorists often seek automatic weapons. Several trials have revealed the difficulties Australian terrorists faced when trying to acquire guns.

Accessing materials for explosives can similarly prove difficult for Australia’s terrorist plotters, due to a range of regulations, which increase the chance of detection. As a result, the terrorists often only had access to handguns, shotguns, or just knives, and rushed to attack with what they had.

Similarly, the lack of attacks by returnees is somewhat distinctive to Australia. It contrasts dramatically with Europe, which saw violent attacks by Islamic State returnees in Paris and Brussels, and many more plots by returnees.

One reason for this is that, being an island with few entry and exit-points, Australia has been in a better position to restrict travel than many other countries. For those who managed to join Islamic State, some may have been deterred from returning by the wave of new counterterrorism laws after 2014 and the knowledge that it is difficult to enter Australia unnoticed.

Furthermore, many Australian supporters of Islamic State never made it to Syria or Iraq, because ASIO cancelled the passports of literally hundreds of people suspected of planning to join the group. Passport cancellation likely played a role in increasing the number of plots inside Australia, as several perpetrators had first sought to join Islamic State abroad, but also helped to keep the plots unsophisticated by preventing more people from gaining the skills or experience needed to carry out larger attacks.

THE POLICE QUESTION

Before 2014, none of Australia's jihadist plots targeted police officers. In the Islamic State era, Australia's jihadists continued to target the general public (as shown by attacks against popular locations in Melbourne and Sydney's central business districts), but the police stood out as a prominent target. From 2014 onwards, there were up to ten plots where police were either the sole target or one of the targets among others.

This targeting of police is less easy to explain in terms of either Islamic State propaganda or specific Australian circumstances.

On the one hand, Islamic State had explicitly called for attacks on security services, including in Adnani’s September 2014 speech. Yet their propaganda also repeatedly emphasised that all civilians were legitimate targets, suggesting that there are also other reasons why police were commonly targeted.

One reason might be that the perpetrators could have found it easier to rationalise killing perceived agents of the state. The aspiring jihadists may have found it more honourable and war-like to attack members of the police and security services. This would be consistent with some cases seen abroad. For example, many jihadists in the United States had plotted to attack military bases even though al-Qaeda propaganda emphasised that civilians were easier targets.

Police may also have often been targets of opportunity. In many cases the plotters knew they were under scrutiny, having had their passports cancelled or been spoken to by police repeatedly.

Revenge may have also played a role, as many of these jihadists had seen their “brothers” arrested in what they viewed as unjust acts of oppression.

Similarly, many of these perpetrators appear to have sought their own deaths, in the name of martyrdom, and attacking police officers is an effective way to achieve that.

Two incidents in Melbourne, the Numan Haider attack and the Sevdet Besim plot, indicate these dynamics at play.

On 18 September 2014 Numan Haider, whose passport was cancelled by ASIO, confronted police officers in a shopping centre. He declared to them that “you will pay for what happened in Brisbane and Sydney today”, referring to the Operation Appleby counter-terrorism raids which foiled an Islamic State terror plot in Sydney. Five days later Haider stabbed two police officers who arranged to talk to him about his passport cancelation, severely injuring the officers before they fatally shot him.

Several months later, Haider’s friend Sevdet Besim plotted to murder police officers on Anzac Day 2015. His intended martyrdom note cited Haider’s death as a catalyst, stating that:

A while ago world leaders declared war on Islam and Muslims, invading lands, dividing us into separate nations, installing puppets, killing and torturing Muslims. This war had always had a[n] impact on me, however recently my brother Numan (may Allah accept him) carried out his attack, this opened my eyes up to the reality of who the enemy is.

Besim had also had his passport cancelled by ASIO, and was in communication with Islamic State figures. In these conversations, Besim repeatedly referred to ASIO, the AFP and Victoria Police as "dogs" and declared his desire for revenge. Therefore it appears that several factors – Haider’s death, the passport cancelation, direct encouragement from IS, a desire for martyrdom, and blaming the authorities for his and Haider’s circumstances – may have shaped his decision to target police officers.

CONCLUSION

These violent plots cannot solely be explained by reference to jihadism. Sometimes the perpetrator's ideological attachment was somewhat superficial and their motivations were complicated. Mental health issues and 'ordinary' criminality sometimes played a role too. However, openly declared jihadist inspiration was a common theme across these plots. The Islamic State, as the organisation that positioned itself as the vanguard of the global jihadist movement, influenced both the emergence of the plots and their methods.

Australia had experienced jihadist plots since the year 2000, when al-Qaeda attempted to use a local Jemaah Islamiyah member named Jack Roche to assist a plot to bomb Israeli diplomatic buildings in Sydney and Canberra. Until 2014 Australia only experienced a small number of these plots, which were quite ambitious, but fortunately failed to harm anybody.

The Islamic State's rise changed this dramatically. As Part 1 showed, jihadist plots in Australia became far more frequent, far simpler, and sadly proved more deadly. As this Part 2 showed, the transformation resulted in large part from Islamic State's global reach, its attack messaging which emphasised simple methods and a sense of urgency, and more distinctively Australian factors including gun control and passport cancelations.

* My table in Part 1 stated "tended to target police", but I've reworded it because that could imply that the clear majority of plots solely targeted police, when the reality is more ambiguous.