On Monday evening, a terrorist blew himself up in the foyer of Manchester Arena as the audience was filing out of an Ariana Grande concert. At least 22 people were killed and 59 wounded in the blast. British authorities have identified Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old whose parents are from Libya, as the suspected suicide bomber.
Less than 24 hours after the chaos in Manchester, the Islamic State issued a claim of responsibility online, describing the bomber (who was not named in the statement) as the group’s “soldier.”
It was likely only a matter of time until an attack this significant was successful inside England. The last major terrorist event in the country occurred on July 7, 2005, when a team of al Qaeda suicide bombers assaulted the London transit system, killing 52 people. There have been small-scale jihadist attacks since then, such as the vehicular assault outside of the British parliament in March. That, too, was claimed by the Islamic State and several people perished. But the British have been fortunate that larger attacks, similar to the bombing in Manchester, were thwarted.
Since mid-2014, when Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s followers declared him to be “Caliph Ibrahim,” British intelligence and counterterrorism officials have been confronted by a wave of plots. This stream of threats deepened in 2015. British authorities discovered then that Islamic State operatives living in Raqqa, Syria, were using social media applications to guide would-be recruits back home.
One especially effective online recruiter was Reyaad Khan, a 21-year-old who had joined Baghdadi’s ranks in Raqqa. On Aug. 21, 2015, Khan was killed in Britain’s first targeted drone strike ever. The UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee later investigated the intelligence used to justify the drone strike. In its final report, released in April, the committee described Khan as a “prolific” threat who taught followers how to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and helped them pick targets.
Khan built on the concepts pushed earlier by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which rejects the Islamic State’s caliphate claim. In 2010, AQAP first began to inspire recruits in the West to carry out attacks on their own in the name of jihad. Those efforts had some success. Both the Fort Hood shooter (November 2009) and the Boston Marathon bombers (April 2013) were at least inspired by AQAP. Early reports indicate that the bomb deployed in Manchester may have some similarities to the ones used at the Boston Marathon. Those bombs, which were packed with shrapnel, were modeled after a design provided in the first issue of AQAP’s Inspire magazine.
Even though AQAP first marketed the concept of the individual jihadist, the Islamic State has taken the concept to a new level. The parliamentary report on Khan accurately noted that the Islamic State has “deployed this methodology on a different scale.” Khan “was prominent in attack planning on behalf of” the so-called caliphate, “directly inciting individuals to conduct attacks” and using “social media to identify potential operatives and then provide them with encouragement and basic capability to enable an attack.”
The UK Parliament found that Khan and another Islamic State planner, Junaid Hussain, “did this on an unprecedented scale,” both in terms of the “range” of threats and the “pace” of them. Hussain’s digital trail led all the way into the United States, where the FBI uncovered a number of his would-be accomplices. Together, Khan and Hussain were “connected to” at least some “of the seven major plots thwarted in the UK in 2015.”
Even after Khan and Hussain were killed in drones strikes in 2015, the Islamic State kept coming. Still more planned attacks were reportedly thwarted inside Britain in 2016. Some of them were small-scale, but others had the potential to be as deadly as the bombing in Manchester, if not worse. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has had success in inspiring terrorists inside the United States and in Europe. Counterterrorism officials across Europe have uncovered numerous plots similar to the ones Khan pursued. They are often referred to as “remote-controlled” terror, as Islamic State planners help their recruits plan attacks online.
There are some oddities in the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the Manchester bombing. Independent reports say the terrorist, presumably Abedi, blew himself up. But the Islamic State’s message does not refer to the perpetrator as a “martyr”—the word it usually uses for a suicide bomber. The group claims that 30 people were killed, but 22 people have perished thus far. That is a notable discrepancy, as the casualty count is easy enough to find online. The self-declared caliphate also claims that multiple “explosive devices” were “detonated,” but it appears only one bomb was used.
In the coming weeks, authorities will learn whether the terrorist had real ties to the Islamic State (including whether he was “remote-controlled”), or was merely inspired by the group, or if there is some other explanation. The Manchester police have made it clear that they are investigating whether “he was acting alone or as part of a network.” And forensics experts will be taking a close look at his bomb to determine if it matches the designs found in jihadi literature, or if it required any specialized knowledge.
Regardless of how these details are worked out, the Islamic State threat to Britain is real, and it isn’t going away any time soon.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
