The Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka were aimed at churches and hotels, killing at least 250 people, many of them worshipers. It is part of a broader trend of terrorism against religious sites
TWO DECADES ago al-Qaeda made its name by mounting a succession of bombings against America across the world. These included the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; an American destroyer moored in Yemen in 2000; and, most bloodily of all, the attacks of September 11th 2001 on American soil.
It took up that strategy so vigorously that it alarmed al-Qaeda’s leadership. In 2005 Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Mr bin Laden’s deputy and now al-Qaeda’s leader, warned AQI that it was alienating people: “the sectarian and chauvinistic factor”, he said, “is secondary in importance to outside aggression”.
IS’s Egyptian branch is responsible for an onslaught of bombings against the country’s Coptic Christian minority . Its devotees in the Gulf have attacked Shia mosques. IS has also been linked to church bombings in Indonesia last year and in the Philippines in January. Al-Qaeda itself has not been averse to acts against religious targets, such as the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, in Tunisia, in 2002. Yet al-Qaeda’s leadership is still committed to the war against the “far enemy”, ie, America and the West, and finds IS’s overt sectarianism too much to stomach. According to Paul Cruickshank, editor of CTC Sentinel, a journal focused on terrorism, a month ago al-Qaeda’s leadership instructed followers to shun attacks on places of worship.
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