| Define something carefully enough, and all the scary possibilities will be excluded, no matter how real they might be. |
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group, according to a top investigator.
Ravi Seneviratne, the head of the Criminal Investigations Department, says the jacket wallahs who targeted three churches and three hotels had no direct link to the foreign jihadi group.
"They followed the IS ideology, but our investigations have not shown any link between them," Seneviratne tells a parliamentary panel probing security and intelligence lapses leading to the April 21 bombings.
He notes that remnants in the local group identified as National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) had persuaded IS to claim the attack two days after the deadly events in Sri Lanka.
NTJ leader Zahran Hashim had made a video with his fellow suicide bombers pledging allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi. The video was released by the IS two days later.