The Best of the Two Good Outcomes: Caribbean Snipers in the Islamic State.

Photo courtesy of Islamic State: Rumiyah #12 showing an IS sniper.

 The following is from Rumiyah #12 the Islamic States online magazine, this issue as with #11, mentions the paramount leader of ISIS Amirul Mumineen in the present tense, indicating that he is still alive. The following sentence is in reference to a Doctor in the Islamic State he was killed in an airstrike, his wife was killed that same day and in a subsequent sentence the leader of IS, was mentioned: “I heard the news that the amir of the Diwan of Health, Dr. ‘Abdullah, was killed after he charged towards the enemies of Allah alone in the neighborhood of Shifa. So may Allah accept him and unite him with his wife, who was killed as a result of mortar strikes on the Old City on the same day that her husband was killed – and we consider that Allah responded to the du’a of our shaykh, who would supplicate to Allah that He take both him and his wife as shuhada together. So how great are you, O knight of the Diwan of Health, and congratulations to Amirul-Muminin for having the likes of these leaders”.

In the same area I met up with a brother who was a sniper from the Caribbean. He overheard me communicating in English with one of the non-Arab brothers, and so he approached me, attempting to recognize the voice, and when we spoke he said, “Do you need a skilled sniper in that place?” I said to him, “Send him!” And so he sent me his brother and the stepson of his brother, Abu Dharr al-Bosni, who is a mujahid in his prime years of age – 15 years old – from Bosnia Herzegovina.

We engaged in conversation with his brother, and I asked him about his path to guidance and how he arrived to the Islamic State. He replied, “I read about jihad in the Quran and contemplated its verses, such as the statement of Allah c, ‘Go forth, whether light or heavy’ (At-Tawbah 41), at which point I began to search for the path to jihad. When the Islamic State was announced, my brother and I raced towards it, and Allah facilitated for us the path to reach it, and to Him belong all praise and grace.” So I said to him jokingly, “We will return to the Caribbean as conquerors – with Allah’s permission – and eat from your fish, and from its coconuts and bananas.” At which he replied, “Never. I don’t want anything except Jannah.” So I smiled at him, for his words reminded me of the two good outcomes as I was thinking of the second of the two – victory.

That the Caribbean is becoming ubiquitous in Islamic State propaganda, is cause for concern since the Caribbean is the perfect staging ground, for spectacular, shock and awe tactics, that can rival 911 in their scope of devastation and terror. Given the regions porous borders, weak border patrols and the absence of a regional data base that identifies terrorist’s from the region, the Caribbean is virgin territory for terrorist attacks and recruitment. Given the vast divide between the poor and wealthy citizens, the disparate levels of education, the widespread corruption of governments and the human trafficking and illegal narcotics trade throughout the Caribbean, returning fighters who fought with IS in Iraq and Syria, will forever change the power relations regionally between the regions governments and those seeking to challenge state power. Any narco cartel in the Caribbean and South America will kill, to get men of the type described previously to either join their ranks or to train their soldiers. The future ‘security’ scenario for the Caribbean as a whole is one of chronic insecurity.