1. Mere hours after the gunman who killed 2 people and wounded around a dozen at one of Europe’s most iconic Christmas markets, the Islamic State issued a bulletin on its official news agency claiming responsibility for the murders: 
2. Some clues we can glean from the language they used: The shooter, who’s been on the lam for the last 2 days, is described as a “soldier of the Islamic State” (the terminology the group uses both for dyed-in-the-wool ISIS members in Syria & for those who act in their name)
3. Crucially, the claim uses phrasing that indicates this was an inspired attack, rather than one directed by the group from Iraq and Syria. Gunman is said to be “responding to calls to target nationals of Coalition countries.” That’s verbatim language from a famous ISIS speech
4. That speech was delivered by this guy: Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, on paper ISIS’ spokesman. But as our reporting has shown he was also the head of ISIS’ external operations arm, in charge of mounting attacks in the West. And in 2014 he made an appeal to ISIS followers worldwide
5. In that speech, Adnani argued that you don’t have to have joined the group to do its bidding. He called on their global base of supporters to carry out attacks in any way they could - with a gun, a knife, a car, even a rock, and to do so without seeking their guidance
6. People always get confused about inspired ISIS attacks. How can we really say it’s ISIS if these guys had no actual contact with the group? What folks are missing is that the inspired attack is a deliberate *strategy* of the Islamic State. Spend 1 day on their channels...
7. .... and you’ll see the enormous effort the group puts into inciting hate and violence among its followers. Some of the most deadly ISIS attacks to date (Nice, Orlando) were carried out by people who merely imbibed the group’s message online.
8. Now let’s look at the timing: Two days after the attack. Why? I don’t know for sure, but this is a pattern we’ve seen. The group doesn’t tend to claim attacks when their boy is on the run, or when he’s in handcuffs (though there have been exceptions).
9. The other thing people get their panties all knotted up about is the mode by which ISIS confirms some of these attacks. Did they learn of the shooter from media reports (meaning from the work of my colleagues & I?). In the case of ISIS inspired attacks, the answer is often yes
10. Folks then wonder, we’ll isn’t that cheating? How can they really know if they have no inside knowledge? Imagine you’re a terror group and you are trying to remotely inspire acts of slaughter, then by definition you don’t have contact with the attacker.
11. What stands out is ISIS’ success using this mode of attack, which poses almost no risk to the core organization since there are no communications breadcrumbs for authorities to follow. To date, *most* of the attacks they’ve claimed in the West were indeed by ppl they inspired
12. There have been several notable exceptions - with Las Vegas probably being the biggest of their f... ups - but for every wrongly claimed ISIS attack, I can point to numerous attacks which we know for sure were carried out by actual ISIS members & which they never claimed.
13. I’ll end with Exhibit A: The Jewish Museum attack in 2014, at that point one of the most deadly terror attacks in Belgium. Never claimed by ISIS. The gunman? Mehdi Nemmouche, who joined ISIS in Syria, and at one point served as one of the jailers of ISIS’ Western hostages
