Nothing stops the jihad war against infidels, not even coronavirus. The Islamic State’s prayer to Allah is for the weaponization of the virus:
“We ask God to increase their torment and save the believers from all that.”
The group has been seeking ways to exploit the spread of the virus. It has now “urged its members to use the opportunity to work toward freeing fellow militants and their family members in prisons where they ‘are threatened by disease in addition to subjugation.'”
In Iraq, some 20,000 suspected IS militants are held in jails across the country. Freeing any number of them would serve to reinforce their operational capabilities and threaten to undo years of coordinated efforts to contain the militant group.
But the Islamic State is also aware of the threat the virus poses, instructing its followers last week “not to travel to Europe for attacks because of outbreak” and that “the healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic.” Islamic State members appear to be trying to balance their own jihadist zeal against the infidel and self-preservation. A newsletter also “instructs members of the group to ‘flee from the one afflicted with leprosy as you flee from the lion.‘”
“Coronavirus: ‘Islamic State’ seeks to profit from pandemic,” by Lewis Sanders IV and Tom Allinson, DW, March 23, 2020:
As public health authorities across the globe struggle to manage a devastating pandemic, the mayhem caused by the novel coronavirus has increasingly figured in the strategy of the “Islamic State” (IS) militant group.
In their regular newsletter circulated last week, IS described the pandemic as a divinely wrought “painful torment” against “crusader nations,” a term referring to Western countries engaged in a military campaign to uproot the group.
It went on to describe the outbreak’s fear factor as having a greater effect than the epidemic itself, saying it has placed the Western world “on the verge of a great economic catastrophe” by restricting mobility, roiling markets and disrupting public life.
“We ask God to increase their torment and save the believers from all that,” the group said..
The outbreak could be seen as reinforcing the militants’ theology. It is also affecting international efforts to contain IS after the group’s military defeat last year….
Indeed, the militant group in mid-March issued an initial advisory concerning the pandemic, calling on its fighters to avoid travel to affected areas. Instead, the IS suggested that they would receive divine protection from illness if they engaged in jihad.
One way to perform such spiritual struggle, the advisory argued, would be to break out fellow militants, their wives and children from prisons in the region. Already in October, more than 750 people with suspected links to IS broke out of Ain Issa camp in northeast Syria, a feat they accomplished by rioting while Kurdish forces were distracted by a Turkish offensive…..